Early American Drama

This collection of eight plays introduces readers to an important and neglected area of American literature

English professor Jeffrey Richards points out how these "melodramas" offer insights into our cultural history and also embody themes and styles still echoed today

This unique volume includes ...

The Gladiator and seven other early dramas that mirror American literary, social, and cultural history

Royall Tyler's The Contrast (1787) - a Sheridian satire about fashion-conscious New Yorkers

; William Dunlap's Andre (1798)

James Nelson Barker's telling of the Pocahontas story, the Indian Princess (1808)

William Henry Smith's The Drunkard (1844)

Anna Cora Mowatt's Fashion (1845), the most successful nineteenth-century play by a female American playwright

George L. Aiken's 1852 - a dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin

And The Octoroon (1859), Dion Boucicault's tragedy concerning a young woman doomed by her racial heritage