Tice L. Miller. Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.(Book review)

Tice L. Miller. Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi + 229.37.50.

Tice Miller's new book covers two centuries of theatrical and dramatic activity in about 180 pages of text, enough to mention key writers, plays, and periods without expounding very much critically or culturally on any one playwright or work. The first chapter covers the colonial period; the second, the early republic; the third, the Jacksonian period; the fourth, the antebellum and postbellum history of melodrama; and the fifth, the rise of realism at century's end. While much of the first ...