Robert L McLaughlin – författare

During the highly charged years of World War II, movies perhaps best communicated to Americans who they were and why they were fighting. These films were more than just an explanation of historical events: they asked audiences to consider the Nazi threat, they put a face on both our enemies and allies, and they explored changing wartime gender roles. We'll Always Have the Movies shows how film after film repeated the narratives, character types, and rhetoric that made the war and each American's role in it comprehensible. Robert L. McLaughlin and Sally E. Parry have watched more than six-hundred films made between 1937 and 1946 -- including many never before discussed in this context -- and have analyzed the cultural and historical importance of these films in explaining the war to moviegoers. This extensive study shows how filmmakers made the chaotic elements of wartime familiar, while actual events became film history, and film history became myth.

From West Side Story in 1957 to Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. Sondheim's brilliant array of work, including such musicals as Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods, has established him as the preeminent composer/lyricist of his, if not all, time.Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical places Sondheim's work in two contexts: the exhaustion of the musical play and the postmodernism that, by the 1960s, deeply influenced all the American arts. Sondheim's musicals are central to the transition from the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical that had dominated Broadway stages for twenty years to a new postmodern musical. This new style reclaimed many of the self-aware, performative techniques of the 1930s musical comedy to develop its themes of the breakdown of narrative knowledge and the fragmentation of identity. In his most recent work, Sondheim, who was famously mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II, stretches toward a twenty-first-century musical that seeks to break out of the self-referring web of language.Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical offers close readings of all of Sondheim's musicals and finds in them critiques of the operation of power, questioning of conventional systems of knowledge, and explorations of contemporary identity.

From West Side Story in 1957 to Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. Sondheim's brilliant array of work, including such musicals as Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods, has established him as the preeminent composer/lyricist of his, if not all, time.Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical places Sondheim's work in two contexts: the exhaustion of the musical play and the postmodernism that, by the 1960s, deeply influenced all the American arts. Sondheim's musicals are central to the transition from the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical that had dominated Broadway stages for twenty years to a new postmodern musical. This new style reclaimed many of the self-aware, performative techniques of the 1930s musical comedy to develop its themes of the breakdown of narrative knowledge and the fragmentation of identity. In his most recent work, Sondheim, who was famously mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II, stretches toward a twenty-first-century musical that seeks to break out of the self-referring web of language.Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical offers close readings of all of Sondheim's musicals and finds in them critiques of the operation of power, questioning of conventional systems of knowledge, and explorations of contemporary identity.

Arthur M. Saltzman, Stanley Elkin: An Introduction/Peter J. Bailey, 'A Hat Where There Never Was a Hat': Stanley Elkin's Fifteenth Interview/Stanley Elkin, Words and Music/William Gass, Stanley Elkin: An Anecdote/Jerome Charyn, On Stanley Elkin/Jerome Klinkowitz, Elkin before Elkin/Charles Molesworth, Stanley Elkin and 'Everything': The Problem of Surfaces and Fullness in the Novels/Alan Wilde, Final Things: More Letters to mzimmer%humanitas@hub.ucsb.edu/D. C. Dougherty, Nemeses and MacGuffins: Paranoia as Focal Metaphor in Stanley Elkin, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon/Peter G. Christensen, The Escape from the Curse of History in Stanley Elkin's George Mills/Patrick O'Donnell, Of Red Herrings and Loose Ends: Reading 'Politics' in Elkin's The MacGuffin/Arthur M. Saltzman, A Stanley Elkin Checklist/Mark Axelrod, Alasdair Gray: An Introduction, of Sorts/Mark Axelrod, An Epistolary Interview, Mostly with Alasdair Gray/Alasdair Gray, The Anthology of Prefaces/Alasdair Gray, Time Travel/Philip Hobsbaum, Alasdair Gray: The Voice of His ProseGeorge Donaldson and Alison Lee, Is Eating People Really Wrong? Dining with Alasdair Gray/William M.Harrison, The Power of Work in the Novels of Alasdair Gray/Stephen Bernstein, Scottish Enough: The London Novels of Alasdair Gray/John C. Hawley, Bell, Book, and Candle: Poor Things and the Exorcism of Victorian Sentiment/Lynne Diamond-Nigh, Gray's Anatomy: When Words and Images Collide/Peter Christensen, Language and Its Discontents in Alasdair Gray's 'Logopandocy'/Janice Galloway, Different Oracles: Me and Alasdair Gray/Mark Axelrod, An Alasdair Gray Checklist