The Routledge Introduction to American Drama

This volume provides an accessible and engaging guide to the study of American dramatic literature. Designed to support students in reading, discussing, and writing about commonly assigned American plays, this text offers timely resources to think critically and originally about key moments on the American stage.

Combining comprehensive coverage of the core plays from the post-Revolutionary era to the present, each chapter includes:

• historical and cultural context of each of the plays and their distinctive literary features
• clear introductions to the ongoing critical debates they have provoked
• collaborative prompts for classroom or online discussion
• annotated bibliographies for further research

With its accessible prose style and clear structure, this introduction spotlights specific plays while encouraging students to contemplate timely questions of American identity across its selected span of US theatrical history.

Paul Thifault, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English at Springfield College in Massachusetts, where he teaches courses on US drama, early American literature, and Native American literature. With Nancy Sweet, he edits Resources for American Literary Study (Penn State UP), a long-running journal of archival and bibliographical scholarship on all periods of American literature.