In Mourning the Nation to Come, Jillian J. Sayre offers a comparative study of early national literature and culture in the United States, Brazil, and Spanish America that theorizes New World nationalism as grounded in cultures of the dead and commemorative acts of mourning. Sayre argues that popular historical romances unified communities of creole readers by giving them lost love objects they could mourn together, allowing citizens of newly formed nations to feel as one"--