In nineteenth-century America, popular theatre acted as the vehicle for the construction of a national ideology. Melodrama and the Myth of America looks at five popular plays that took as their subjects important issues in American life: Metamora and the "Indian" Question, The Drunkard and the temperance movement, Uncle Tom's Cabin and slavery, My Partner and the American West, and Shenandoah and the Civil War. These plays present American history as a grand melodrama.

Jeffrey Mason investigates the reasons for their popular success and reconstructs the social and political backdrop against which they were viewed. He shows how they functioned in the social discourse of the time as collective affirmations of certain cultural myths. Yet these acts of communal belief were played out on the contested stage of American ideological debate.

Mason finds telling contradictions in the plays, revealing the plight of the excluded or second-class citizen or suggesting views of race, class, and gender that differed from those of white, male, middle-class culture. in his analysis, theatre becomes an intricate and reflexive exercise in cultural self-definition. in these plays, we see mainstream America's attempts to grapple with the key social issues of the day and to stage the emergence of the American myth.