Overview

How has the advent of digital technology impacted social and institutional trust? And how can imaginative literature help us to answer this question? Impelled by this dual inquiry, Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature addresses the intersections among digital studies, literary studies and studies of trust and distrust. Approaching the contemporary age through the longue duree of literary tradition, the volume is particularly concerned to identify the special affordances of literature for approaching problems of dis/trust in the digital world. Readers will be informed about topical subjects and urgent issues, including the impact of digital technologies on the (literary) public sphere, the status of the digital image and the threat of deepfakes, the emergence of cryptocurrencies and the digital economy, and the AI revolution. Each chapter approaches these topics and issues through the lens of literary texts while also considering how the ways we think about literature are changing in the digital age.

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9781399551977

Table of Contents

Reviews

This volume brings together hard thinking on literature and a key problem of our time: that of public (dis)trust. It synthesises helpful-but-fragmented existing reflections on these intersecting fields in a timely companion on digitisation, trust and literary writing. In sound analyses, the authors – high-profile scholars in fields ranging from data science via political economy to literary and film studies – persuasively demonstrate that in digitised times imaginative literature matters, perhaps, more than ever. -- Ellen Rutten, University of Amsterdam

Author Information

Adam Kelly is Associate Professor of English at University College Dublin. He is the author of American Fiction in Transition (2013) and New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age (2024). He has co-edited special issues of Comparative Literature Studies and Open Library of the Humanities, and his research has appeared in journals including American Literary History, Twentieth-Century Literature, Studies in the Novel, and Post45. He is Principal Investigator on the Research Ireland-funded project ‘Imaginative Literature and Social Trust, 1990-2025', leading a team of four scholars. Katerina Pavlidi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin, working on the Research Ireland-funded project ‘Imaginative Literature and Social Trust, 1990-2025.’ She specialises in late- and post-Soviet literature and culture with a focus on Russia. She is the author of the forthcoming book Vladimir Sorokin’s Body Aesthetics: Language, Materiality, Affect. Her research has appeared in Slavic Review and in the edited volume Soviet Materialities (2025). She is co-convener of the Soviet Temporalities Study Group which is supported by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES).

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