S. E. Wilmner is a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and formerly Director of the School of Drama. He has been a Visiting Professor at Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the faculty of the International Centre for Advanced Theatre Studies, in Finland. Steven Wilmer is editor of Portraits of Courage: Plays by Finish Women (Helsinki University Press, 1997) and of Beckett in Dublin (Lilliput, 1992), among other works. He is also a playwright, with his works performed at the Manhattan Theatre Club and Lincoln Center.

'… useful and impressive book … both fluent and scholarly … It is a welcome contribution to the study of American theatre … its conclusions are so engaging that its arguments will become well known by a generation or more of Shakespeareans. … Erne's book is marvelously researched, meticulously annotated, sensitively illustrated, and delivered in clear, refulgent prose … every reader will be stimulated and provoked.' New Theatre Quarterly

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. From British colony to independent nation: refashioning identity; 2. Federalist and Democratic Republican theatre: partisan drama in nationalist trappings; 3. Independence for whom? American Indians and the Ghost Dance; 4. The role of workers in the nation: the Paterson Strike Pageant; 5. Staging social rebellion in the 1960s; 6. Reconfiguring patriarchy: suffragette and feminist plays; 7. Imaging and deconstructing the multicultural nation in the 1990s; Notes; Select bibliography; Index.