This revised student edition provides a wealth of additional information including a chronology of the playwright's life and work, an introduction giving the background to the play, discussion of the various interpretations, notes on individual words and phrases as well as photographs from stage productions. A Streetcar Named Desire portrays a turbulent confrontation between traditional values in the American South - an old-world graciousness and beauty running decoratively to seed - and the rough-edged, aggressive materialism of the new world. Through the vividly characterised figures of Southern belle Blanche Dubois, seeking refuge from physical ugliness in decayed gentility, and her brutal brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski, Tennessee Williams dramatises his sense of the South's past as still active and often destructive in modern America.