ABSTRACT

As Edward Said has pointed out in his seminal study on Orientalism, “it needs to be made clear about cultural discourse and exchange that what is commonly circulated by it is not ‘truth’ but representations” (21). Based upon this assumption, I seek to explore the role of early American theater in representing social and political myths. As the most public form of cultural expression, the theater followed closely the ideological e ort of the American nation to promote a sense of nationhood.1 From the founding of the new republic to the years after the Civil War, the American theater contributed signifi cantly to the process of formulating and revising national identity among a people whose concept of nationhood was determined by a set of ideological ambiguities that stemmed from the essential contradiction between advertising imagined realities-republican institutions, popular sovereignty, the motto of equal opportunities for all-and repressing internal di erences, tensions, and divisions.