Abstract
The concluding chapter of this book draws together the themes of class, nation, gender, conflict, and nostalgia, to offer a sense that London-centric musical comedy—arising from the metropolitan imperatives of late Victorian modernity—configured Britishness as a sprawling, contradictory, paradoxical cultural identity, full of imperial anxieties, domestic uncertainty, and personal challenges. Returning to the definition of Britishness offered in the introductory chapter, the suggestion is made that the ‘British musical theatre’ explored in this book is actually ‘English musical theatre’, after which the chapter reflects on the problems associated with this term and concludes with provocations for further research.
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Notes
- 1.
By now, it is unsurprising that Mikes felt the need to qualify this statement: ‘When people say England, they sometimes mean Great Britain, sometimes the United Kingdom, sometimes the British Isles—but never England’ (2015, p. 10).
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Macpherson, B. (2018). The English Musical in Many Stories. In: Cultural Identity in British Musical Theatre, 1890–1939. Palgrave Studies in British Musical Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59807-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59807-3_8
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