Though there have been many histories of the theater and specifically the theatrical musical, none has done quite what Musical Theater and American Culture achieves: it explores how the musical emerged in the late-18th and 19th centuries as a specifically American form of entertainment and went on to become a powerful medium of popular and political collective expression, articulating the tensions and reconciliations of everyday relations between individuals and society. Intimately related to the forging of social, cultural, and political American identities, the musical―often dismissed as merely entertainment―is tied inextricably to America's sense of itself as a New World, a land of opportunity, and above all, the emblem of modern culture. Including material on genres ranging from minstrel shows to melodrama to the development of the contemporary book musical and the megamusical, Musical Theater and American Culture delves into such important shows as Anything Goes, West Side Story, Evita, and Rent; it represents the first sustained analysis of this medium as a social and political vehicle.Authors David F. Walsh and Len Platt further consider how the current condition of the musical, the emergence of specialist musicals, revivals, and blockbuster musicals intended for a globalized audience relate both aesthetically and culturally to their Broadway progenitors. Tackling the much broader question of what the fragmentation of this popular culture now indicates about contemporary America, they forge a new and unique study sure to appeal to both scholars of the theater and fans of its ongoing and always -fascinating new forms.

Musical Theater and American Culture

Politics & Social Sciences

Walsh, David

Platt, Len

Social Sciences

Praeger

From 1890 to 1920, the British aristocracy faded in historical importance. The culture of that period often presented aristocratic characters and typically sought to conserve aristocratic values. The fall of the aristocracy triggered astonishing literary responses. In literary works, aristocrats were transformed into warrior heroes, Scotland Yard detectives, swashbucklers, diseased degenerates, and Gothic monsters. This book explores the centrality of aristocracy to late Victorian and early-20th-century literary culture.Included are discussions of such writers as Marie Corelli, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, H.G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf. The volume looks at major canonical authors as well as some forgotten figures from popular literary culture. In doing so, it establishes links between different types of literature of this period and challenges some important standard views on such topics as Shaw's socialism and Woolf's commitment to the common reader. A significant new addition to historical approaches to literature, this volume raises central questions about cultural processes and the nature of cultural value.

Aristocracies of Fiction: The Idea of Aristocracy in Late-Nineteenth-Century and Early-Twentieth-Century Literary Culture (Contributions to the Study of World Literature)

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

James Joyce and Education (Literature and Education)

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

Routledge

James Joyce and Education is the first full-length study of education across the Joyce oeuvre. A new account of how the politics and aesthetics of the Joyce text is informed by historical contexts, it is the latest contribution to the growing contemporary debate about education, late modernism and literary innovation. 
This highly original account reads Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in new and challenging ways. It produces the Joyce text as a complex and comic devotion to the representation of schooled education ― an exemplification of the elitism that state schooling was historically designed to reproduce and a devastating undoing of the epistemologies it was designed to sustain. Chapters explore a range of themes, including Joyce and radical education, the impact of Nietzsche’s writing on Joyce and women and education. 
The book will appeal to researchers, scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of literature in education, pedagogy, Joyce scholarship and modernism.

Popular Culture in Europe since 1800

History

Becker, Tobias

Europe

Len Platt charts a fresh approach through one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century literature. Using original archival research and detailed close readings, he outlines Joyce's literary response to the racial discourse of twentieth-century politics. Platt's account is the first to position Finnegans Wake in precise historical conditions and to explore Joyce's engagement with European fascism. Race, Platt claims, is a central theme for Joyce, both in terms of the colonial and post-colonial conflicts between the Irish and the British, and in terms of its use by the extreme right. It is in this context that Joyce's engagement with race, while certainly a product of colonial relations, also figures as a wider disputation with rationalism, capitalism and modernity.

Joyce, Race and 'Finnegans Wake'

Cambridge University Press

Len Platt charts a fresh approach through one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century literature. Using original archival research and detailed close readings, he outlines Joyce's literary response to the racial discourse of twentieth-century politics. Platt's account is the first to position Finnegans Wake in precise historical conditions and to explore Joyce's engagement with European fascism. Race, Platt claims, is a central theme for Joyce, both in terms of the colonial and post-colonial conflicts between the Irish and the British, and in terms of its use by the extreme right. It is in this context that Joyce's engagement with race, while certainly a product of colonial relations, also figures as a wider disputation with rationalism, capitalism and modernity.

Introduces the work of James Joyce, the literary, historical and political contexts in which he wrote and his critical reception up to the present day.&gt;

James Joyce: Texts and Contexts (Literary Studies)

Continuum

James Joyce stands at the forefront of modernism - a writer whose work has gained a unique status in modern Western culture. This book offers an introduction to reading and studying Joycean texts and surveys the key contexts - literary, historical, political, philosophical and compositional - which shaped and determined them. By identifying and engaging with Joyce's writing methods and style, the book opens up strategies and approaches for reading his complex texts. It also introduces the critical reception of Joyce and his work, from the early structuralist and 'myth' critics, through deconstruction, to recent developments including historical criticism and genetic criticism.

James Joyce: Texts and Contexts

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Platt, Len. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Platt, Len

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Platt, Len. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Musical Theater and American Culture

Aristocracies of Fiction: The Idea of Aristocracy in Late-Nineteenth-Century and Early-Twentieth-Century Literary Culture (Contributions to the Study of World Literature)

James Joyce and Education (Literature and Education)

James Joyce and Education (Literature and Education)

Popular Culture in Europe since 1800

Popular Culture in Europe since 1800

Joyce, Race and 'Finnegans Wake'

Joyce, Race and 'Finnegans Wake'

James Joyce: Texts and Contexts (Literary Studies)

James Joyce: Texts and Contexts