Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic: 22 (Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama, Series Number 22)
Cambridge University Press, 10/27/2005
EAN 9780521847469, ISBN10: 052184746X
Hardcover, 406 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm
Language: English
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.