Overview

The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies offers a series of cutting-edge essays on the most important and compelling topics in the growing field of Sondheim Studies. Focusing on broad groups of issues relating to the music and the production of Sondheim works, rather than on biographical questions about the composer himself, the handbook represents a cross-disciplinary introduction to comprehending Sondheim in musicological, theatrical, and socio-cultural terms. This collection of never-before published essays addresses issues of artistic method and musico-dramaturgical form, while at the same time offering close readings of individual shows from a variety of analytical perspectives. The handbook is arranged into six broad sections: issues of intertextuality and authorship; Sondheim's pioneering work in developing the non-linear form of the concept musical; the production history of Sondheim's work; his writing for film and television; his exploitation and deployment of a wide range of musical genres; and how interpretation through key critical lenses (including sociology, history, and feminist and queer theory) establishes his position in a broader cultural context.

Full Product Details

9780190258191

Table of Contents

Reviews

You'll be glad you did all those bicep curls when you pick up The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies...fascinating, revealing, provocative. --The Bay Area Reporter

Robert Gordon, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies, suggests in his introduction that Sondheim's work straddles two theatrical periods, and indeed was the catalyst for the second, ushering it in with Company in 1970, and Follies the following year. --Judith Flanders, The Times Literary Supplement

"""You'll be glad you did all those bicep curls when you pick up The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies...fascinating, revealing, provocative.""--The Bay Area Reporter"

Author Information

Robert Gordon is Professor of Drama and Director the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London . He is an actor, playwright, critic and director who has written on acting theory, post-war British theatre, South African theatre, Oscar Wilde, Pirandello, Pinter, Stoppard, Osborne and Arthur Miller.

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