Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T15:11:51.315Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Oklahoma!: ideology and politics in the vernacular tradition of the American musical

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 November 2008

Extract

Musicals, like all popular texts and forms of art have an explicitly reflexive relationship with the societies from which they stem. As well as reflecting the historical and cultural character of society they voice society's own sense of its life and values. They are properly analysed, therefore, in terms of what Geertz (1975) has termed the ‘thick description’ of culture, whereby their organisation, construction and meaning is treated in terms of how they are lodged in, and lodge within themselves, the cultural and social structures of the society of which they are a social expression and with which they are reflexively engaged.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Altman, R. (ed.) 1981. Genre: The Musical (London)Google Scholar
Altman, R. 1987. The American Film Musical (Indiana)Google Scholar
Babington, B. and Evans, F. 1985. Blue Skies, Silver Linings: Aspects of the Hollywood Musical (Manchester)Google Scholar
Barrios, R. 1995. A Song in the Dark (Oxford)Google Scholar
Block, G. 1998. Enchanted Evenings: Broadway Musicals from ‘Showboat’ to Sondheim (New York)Google Scholar
Brenner, R. 1998. ‘The economics of global turbulence: a special report on the world economy, 1950–1998’, New Left Review 229Google Scholar
Brogan, H. 1986. The Pelican History of the United States of America (London)Google Scholar
Burston, J. 1997. ‘Enter stage right: neoconservatism, English Canada and the megamusical’, Soundings, 5, pp. 179–90Google Scholar
Easton, C. 1996. No Intermissions: The Life of Agnes De Mille (New York)Google Scholar
Edwards, A. 1988. The De Milles: An American Family (London)Google Scholar
Elias, N. 1994. The Civilizing Process (Oxford)Google Scholar
Ewen, D. 1959 (revised). Complete Book of the American Musical Theater (New York)Google Scholar
Feuer, J. 1982. The Hollywood Musical (London)Google Scholar
Ganzl, K. 1995a., Ganzl's Book of the Broadway Musical (New York)Google Scholar
Ganzl, K. 1995b. Musicals (London)Google Scholar
Geertz, C. 1975. The Interpretation of Cultures (London)Google Scholar
Gherman, B. 1990. Agnes De Mille: Dancing off the Earth (New York)Google Scholar
Harris, J. 1993. ‘Modernism and culture in the USA, 1930–1960’, in Modernism in Dispute: Art since the Forties, Wood, P., et al. (New Haven and London)Google Scholar
Hitler, A. 1943. Mein Kampf (Boston)Google Scholar
Lacan, J. 1977. Écrits (New York)Google Scholar
Lawson-Peebles, R. (ed.) 1996. Approaches to the American Musical (Exeter)Google Scholar
Lemaire, A. 1977. Jacques Lacan (London)Google Scholar
McNeill, W. 1995. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA)Google Scholar
Mennell, S. 1990. ‘The globalization of human society as a very long-term social process: Elias's theory’, Theory, Culture and Society, 7, pp. 359–71Google Scholar
Morrden, E. 1983. Broadway Babies: The People who made the American Musical (New York)Google Scholar
Neocleous, M. 1997. Fascism (Buckingham)Google Scholar
Rodgers, R. 1975. Musical Stages: An Autobiography (New York)Google Scholar
Sumner, W. 1906. Folkways (Boston)Google Scholar
Steyn, Mark. 1997. Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now (London)Google Scholar
Swain, J. 1990. The Broadway Musical (Oxford)Google Scholar
Turner, F. 1920. The Frontier in American History (New York)Google Scholar
Turner, F. 1932. The Significance of Sections in American History (New York)Google Scholar
Wall, C. 1996. ‘There's no business like show business: a speculative reading of the Broadway musical’, in Approaches to the American Musical, ed. Lawson-Peebles, R. (Exeter)Google Scholar
Walsh, D. 1996. American Popular Culture and the Genesis of the Musical (London)Google Scholar
Warren, L. 1977. Lester Horton: Modern Dance Pioneer (New York)Google Scholar
Weisberger, B. (ed.) 1985. The WPA Guide to America: The Best of 1930's America as seen by the Federal Writers' Project (New York)Google Scholar
Wood, P., Frascina, F., Harris, J. and Harrison, C. 1993. Modernism in Dispute: Art since the Forties (New Haven and London)Google Scholar