Nation(Re) Building through Popular Literature : The Myths of the American Revolution and the Cultural Dissemination of Antebellum Sensational/Sentimental Narratives

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This project clarifies how the myths and spirit of the American Revolutionary relate to the sensationalism and sentimentalism that emerged in American culture in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the course of investigation, the following points are especially focused on : 1) how idealistic biographical portraits of the Founding Fathers obscured defining contradictions of American Independence and nation building ; 2) how exemplary myths of the Founding Fathers have been disseminated and received since the Republican period ; 3) how these underlying contradictions, though obscured, nourished the subversive imagination in America ; and 4) how this subversive American spirit is reflected in antebellum sensational/sentimental narratives.