Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic

A 2005 study into American identity as revealed in the plays of post-revolutionary America.

Jeffrey H. Richards (Author)

9780521847469, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 October 2005

406 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm, 0.77 kg

"...a useful and insightful work for the Revolutionary period and the first formative decades of the nation....the work is well-researched and clearly written, occasionally amusing, and always honest in its style and assumptions."
Odai Johnson, Virgina Magazine

Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic investigates the way in which theatre both reflects and shapes the question of identity in post-revolutionary American culture. In this 2005 book Richards examines a variety of phenomena connected to the stage, including closet Revolutionary political plays, British drama on American boards, American-authored stage plays, and poetry and fiction by early Republican writers. American theatre is viewed by Richards as a transatlantic hybrid in which British theatrical traditions in writing and acting provide material and templates by which Americans see and express themselves and their relationship to others. Through intensive analyses of plays both inside and outside of the early American 'canon', this book confronts matters of political, ethnic and cultural identity by moving from play text to theatrical context and from historical event to audience demography.

Introduction
1. American identities and the transatlantic stage
Part I. Staging Revolution at the Margins of Celebration: 2. Revolution and unnatural identity in Crevecoeur's 'Landscapes'
3. British author, American text: The Poor Soldier in the New Republic
4. American author, British source: writing revolution in Murray's Traveller Returned
5. Patriotic interrogations: committees of safety in early American drama
6. Dunlap's Queer Andre: versions of revolution and manhood
Part II. Coloring Identities: Race, Religion, and the Exotic: 7. Susannah Rowson and the dramatized Muslim
8. James Nelson Barker and the stage American native
9. American stage Irish in the Early Republic
10. Black theater, white theater, and the stage African
Part III. Theatre, Culture, and Reflected Identity: 11. Tales of the Philadelphia theatre: Ormond, National performance, and supranational identity
12. A British or an American Tar? Play, player, and spectator in Norfolk, 1797–1800
13. After The Contrast: Tyler, civic virtue, and the Boston stage.

Subject Areas: Theatre studies [AN]