Sentimental literature, and especially novels, both expressed and resolved the crises of knowledge inherent in the construction of modernity and the self: epistemological questions of ‘truth’ and sociological questions of ‘virtue’. Epistemological questions of truth spoke to the nature and site of value. Where was truth and/or value located – in objectively knowable and received empiricist systems of knowledge, or in the ‘private system’ and subjectivity of emotions, feelings and the imagination? Likewise, the fashioning of self in an age of economic volatility, advice books, sociability and manners undermined accepted notions of trust – who was true and who was false? Self-fashioned subjective identities, like the new bank notes based on trust, circulated and/or were discounted, but might also bankrupt the holder. The story of the virtuous maiden seduced by the rake was thus first a sentimental tale designed to inflame the spectator's sympathy. Second, it was the story of counterfeit value.

Americans of the Early Republic – especially Boston's cosmopolitan Unitarians – perceived the sympathetic feelings engendered by sentimental representations as the production of society.