Approaches to the American Musical (Exeter Studies in American & Commonwealth Arts) (Exeter Studies in American and Commonwealth Arts)

Most books on the American musical are little more than exercises in nostalgia. The specially commissioned essays that make up Approaches to the American Musical take a different view of the form. Going beyond the common assertion that musicals are simply escapist, these examinations of American stage and film musicals argue that Porgy and Bess, Top Hat, Kiss Me Kate and All That Jazz were popular precisely because they engaged with such important American issues as ethnicity, commerce and international relations.

Robert Lawson-Peebles is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and American Studies, University of Exeter.His research field is transatlantic cultural relations, from pre-Columbian times until the present. He has published three books on American environmental history: a monograph, Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America (1988), and two collections of original essays co-edited with Professor Mick Gidley (now of Leeds University), Downloads of American Landscapes (1989) and Modern American Landscapes (1995). He has also published essays on, amongst others, George Washington, Susannah Rowson, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry George, and William Carlos Williams.His interests include American performance arts, and he has published an introductory essay on the subject, an article on the impact of the Second World War on Hollywood versions of English novels, and an edited collection of original essays, Approaches to the American Musical (1996).