| This study explores the invention and evolution of a performative national mythology expressing ideas of American identity in colonial and early American dramatic literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. More specifically, it examines the ways in which early American playwrights adapted the classical European myth of Aeneas and the Roman historical narrative of Cato to address issues and conflicts related to the European confrontation with the realities of the New World. Exploring the mythologies of early America with the help of a number of tropes and metaphors including theatrum mundi, Roman pietas, captivity, the frontier, and the carnivalesque, the study traces the ways performance and performative speech were used by early American playwrights to create and develop distinctive concepts of American identity, concepts that were often appropriated directly from European, Native American, and African-American sources. Finally, it examines the ways colonial and early American drama helped create mythologies of national identity by performing our confrontations with ourselves, our history, and our archetypal Others--the various heroic outlaws, exiles, and rebels who are characterized in all their forms as the Indians in the Mirror. |
