The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies
- Submitting institution
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Goldsmiths' College
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 2340
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- ISBN
- 9780195391374
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- June
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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T - Theatre and Performance
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The concept for this first scholarly collection to explore the musical dramaturgy of Stephen Sondheim’s complete oeuvre across genres, media and forms was my sole responsibility. The book’s intention was to offer a multidisciplinary perspective on the multiple aspects of Sondheim’s career, so my role was not only to sketch putative abstracts for each of 27 chapters but also to find every contributor in order to ensure both broad coverage and specialised expertise in the design and writing of the Handbook. This represented a major work of scholarship to identify and contract the most effective writers: the volume’s achievement is to have brought together the most internationally distinguished musicologist in musical theatre studies (Stephen Banfield), the author of the first book on Sondheim as a postmodernist (Robert McLaughlin), leading international feminist musical theatre scholar (Stacy Wolf), major British opera director (Keith Warner) and Goldsmiths sociologist (Paul Filmer). _x000D_
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The book includes the first scholarly essays on Sondheim’s film score for Resnais’ Stavisky, a queer analysis of Sondheim’s work and his only television musical. The Introduction begins to analyse how a songwriter can function as (in Sondheim’s words) a ‘dramatist in song’ by examining a song from Gypsy which traces the process of elaboration in a single moment from dialogue scene, through action, singing and dance to transform into the full complex of acting-music-singing-dancing that constitutes the basic unit of the Gesamtkunstwerk that characterises the ‘integrated’ book musical; this leads to my own 7,800-word chapter ‘Tradition and Experiment in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum’, that explores the way in which Sondheim deconstructs such integrated musical theatre forms to produce a postmodern dis-integration of the musical to its primitive components of burlesque and vaudeville.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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