Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature

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).

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.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsNotes on ContributorsIntroduction: Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative LiteratureAdam Kelly and Katerina PavlidiPart I. Dis/Trusting Authority and Digital Publics1.Trust and Authenticity in the Age of Infinite DataWilliam Davies2. Trust Me, I’m an Author: Literary Publicness in the Digital WorldDaniel South3. ‘A Cartesian Howl’: Trusting the Un/Reliable Human in Hari Kunzru’s Red PillRhona Jamieson4. Trust and Authorship in Brandon Sanderson’s Fiction and FandomCaitlin Smith and Trenton W. Ford Part II. Dis/Trusting Artificial Intelligence5. Edgar Allan Poe, the Mechanical Turk and Technological PurismJeffrey M. Binder6. Long Live the New Flesh: AI Compliance and Trust in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the SunCurtis Runstedler7. In the Mirror of Artificial Intelligence: Sincerity, Literature and Trustin Viktor Pelevin’s iPhuck 10Katerina PavlidiPart III. Dis/Trusting the Digital Economy8. ‘Too paranoid for you?’: Suspicion, Trust and (Post/Meta?)Modern Money inThomas Pynchon’s Bleeding EdgeRob Hawkes9. Trusting the Blockchain, Trusting the Novel in Jennifer Egan’sThe Candy HouseAdam Kelly10. Trusting in the Trustless: The Implications of NFT PoetryBryn TalesPart IV. Dis/Trusting the Digital Image11. Dis/Trusting Digital Photography in Contemporary Irish Women’s WritingHelen Penet12. Horrors of Digital Communication in Found-Footage Supernatural FilmsThomas BrittIndex