Includes bibliographical references (p. [179]-218) and index.
Contents
Theater, nation, and state in early America -- Cato and company : a genealogy of performance -- Free-born poeples : the politics of professional theater in early America -- A school for patriots : colonial college theater -- Bellicose letters : propaganda plays of the Revolution -- Epilogue : Post-revolutionary patriotism and the American theater.
Summary
Performing Patriotism examines the role of theatrical performance and printed drama in the development of early American political culture. Building on the eighteenth-century commonplace that the theater could be a school for public virtue, Jason Shaffer illustrates the connections between the popularity of theatrical performances in eighteenth-century British North America and the British and American national identities that colonial and Revolutionary Americans espoused. The result is a wide-ranging survey of eighteenth-century American theater history and print culture. [from the publisher]
