Musicals at the Margins: Genre, Boundaries, Canons

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But is it a musical This question is regularly asked of films, television shows and other media objects that sit uncomfortably in the category despite evident musical connections. Musicals at the Margins argues that instead of seeking to resolve such questions, we should leave them unanswered and unsettled, proposing that there is value in examining the unstable edges of genre. This collection explores the marginal musical in a diverse range of historical and global contexts. It encompasses a range of different forms of marginality including boundary texts (films/media that are sort of/not quite musicals), musical sequences (marginalized sequences in musicals; musical sequences in non-musicals), music films, musicals of the margins (musicals produced from social, cultural, geographical, and geopolitical margins), and musicals across media (television and new media). Ultimately these essays argue that marginal genre texts tell us a great deal about the musical specifically and genre more broadly.

Reviews

Richly referenced and meticulously edited, Musicals at the Margins is an essential book in cinema scholarship and will surely lead to wider conversations and more specific studies in the future. * Lou Reviews Blog *
Harnessing a mixture of critical insight and knowledge as dazzling as the musical itself, Julie Lobalzo Wright and Martha Shearer have brought together a diverse group of writers to define and redefine musical films beyond the familiar canon. This superbly revealing collection offers entirely new perspectives on the boundaries of a genre that has often left scholars bewitched, bothered and bewildered. * Dominic McHugh, Professor in Musicology, University of Sheffield, UK *
Musicals at the Margins covers a wide range of musical texts existing on the borders of the genre, expanding and complicating how musical texts make meaning as musicals. The anthologys remarkable selection of scholars examines generic outlierslike rockumentaries, dance-focused films, televised lip-synching contests, Bollywood song picturization, and short-form pop music filmdemonstrating how methodologies developed by canonical musical scholars like Rick Altman and Jane Feuer continue to inform contemporary scholarship. As the boundaries between genres, media platforms, and audiences become increasingly difficult to parse, Shearer and Wrights collection is a much-needed addition to the existing literature on the musical, and the field of genre theory as a whole. * Amanda Ann Klein, Associate Professor of Film Studies, East Carolina University, USA *

Author Bio

Martha Shearer is Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in Film Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of New York City and the Hollywood Musical: Dancing in the Streets (2016). Her work on the musical has also been published in Screen, The Soundtrack, and The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations (2019). Julie Lobalzo Wrightis an Assistant Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Crossover Stardom: Male Popular Music Stars in American Cinema (2018), co-editor with Lucy Bolton of Lasting Screen Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that Endure (2016), and has published research on stardom and musical/music films in various edited collections and in the journals Celebrity Studies and Film/Philosophy.