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    • Graduate School - MU Theses and Dissertations (MU)
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    • 2018 Dissertations (MU)
    • 2018 MU dissertations - Freely available online
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    Harmonizing with the cosmos : a critical analysis of cosmic symbolism in musical theatre

    Holley, Rebecca Hannelore
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    [PDF] research.pdf (1.789Mb)
    Date
    2018
    Format
    Thesis
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    Abstract
    Humankind has long possessed a fascination with the cosmos and the cosmic bodies they can see from their earthly home. Overtime humans began to associate deities with the cosmic bodies, and religions developed to explain the cosmos and humans' place within it. Early humans created artifacts, using the imagery of cosmic bodies to mark the passage of time and to symbolize their relationship to the cosmos. When they began writing, this use of the cosmic bodies appeared in their literary works and in the works of Ancient Greek and Roman playwrights, William Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and Thornton Wilder, among many others. Musical theatre, integrated into a unique theatre genre in the mid-twentieth century, similarly followed this impulse to use cosmic bodies to elucidate character and themes. The relationship of these instances, however, to the long traditional symbolic use of cosmic symbolism in Western thought and the ways in which the cosmic symbolism reveals character traits has been largely overlooked in musical theatre scholarship. This analysis contributes the first book-length study investigating cosmic symbolism in selected, representative musicals that span the time period from the American Golden Age through the present. Aided by available scholarship from the fields of astrology, anthropology, psychology, semiotics, religious studies, and philosophy this study aims to increase understanding of how cosmic symbolism functions within representative musical theatre works and what that symbolism reveals about humans' interactions with the cosmos.
    URI
    https://hdl.handle.net/10355/69859
    https://doi.org/10.32469/10355/69859
    Degree
    Ph. D.
    Thesis Department
    Theatre (MU)
    Rights
    OpenAccess
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License
    Collections
    • 2018 MU dissertations - Freely available online
    • Theatre electronic theses and dissertations (MU)

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