Melodrama and the Myth of America

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Indiana University Press, 1993 - Drama - 247 pages
In nineteenth-century America, popular theatre acted as the vehicle for the construction of a national ideology. Melodrama and the Myth of America looks at five popular plays that took as their subjects important issues in American life: Metamora and the "Indian" Question, The Drunkard and the temperance movement, Uncle Tom's Cabin and slavery, My Partner and the American West, and Shenandoah and the Civil War. These plays present American history as a grand melodrama.

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Contents

Constructing American Ideology
1
Metamora 1829 and the Indian Question
23
The Drunkard 1844 and the Temperance Movement
61
Copyright

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