American drama is, for me, the canary in the mine shaft of American literary and cultural studies. That it lies gasping for air is a sign that something is wrong with the entire critical and educational apparatus that promotes, sustains, and generates disciplinary enterprises. Therefore, my project is an inquiry into the cultural reception and position of American dramatic literature, which, in my view, is marked by the extensive degree to which it has been marginalized, excluded, or “disciplined” in the culture in general and the university in particular. Although the use of “disciplined” necessarily invokes the historian Michel Foucault and his analyses of institutions and their discourses and processes, this study is not theorized along strict Foucauldian lines. Certainly I am concerned with the creation of academic disciplines and the organization and management of fields of study; but I am interested as well in the “punishing” power of disciplinary fields, in particular in the ability to hierarchize, denigrate, and exclude American drama.

Four major concerns have prompted me: first, the generic hegemony, that is, the dominance of poetry and prose, which has always characterized canonized American literature and literary histories; second, the debatable essential “Americanness” of American drama and its objectives as perceived and codified by literary critics, anthologizers, and historians; third, the use to which drama was put in early American educational texts and the problematic location of American drama in the developing higher-education curriculum; and fourth, the cultural “place” of American drama as created in part by the emerging discipline of American sociology and in part by the fraught status of realistic dramaturgy.