Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0009-0007-9307-6926
Date Available
4-1-2024
Year of Publication
2024
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
College
Arts and Sciences
Department/School/Program
English
Advisor
Michelle Sizemore
Co-Director of Graduate Studies
Lisa Zunshine
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how constructions of trust can be undermined or reinforced by examining trust’s entanglement with our compulsive and subjective desire to know in nineteenth-century American literature. Specifically, I analyze how different fictional genres – satire, historical romance, fantastic, and gothic – respond to our desire to know through the types of trust fictional texts feature and construct with the reader. In doing so, I demonstrate how genres of fiction in nineteenth-century America function as dynamic social contracts that amplify and undermine the reader’s trust in larger sociopolitical systems (e.g., national identity) and the epistemologies that underpin those systems (e.g., Enlightenment rationality). I contend that trust is a cognitive and cultural issue with sociopolitical and affective dimensions that fictional genres actively exploit and interrogate through their promotion and portrayals of metacognitive activity. Thus, this project examines the relationship between trust, the desire to know, and metacognition by exploring how different fictional genres in early America were animated by these foundational questions: How do we know what we know? How do we know who and what to trust?
Overall, the metacognitive dilemmas present in each genre illustrate the uncomfortable reality that our desire to know relies upon extensions of credibility that are contrived at best, problematic and fragile at worst. Chapter 1, “Satirical Games and Affect Truths,” sets the stage for examining these dynamics. Looking at texts including Washington Irving’s A History of New York (1809) and Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857), I argue that the reflexive and performative dynamics of satire’s fictionality undermines the rhetorical goals of the genre. Chapter 2, “The Historical Romance and White Embodied Limits of Knowing,” applies a cognitive lens to Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) to argue that the genre positions indigenous bodies as metacognitive disruptions and conduits for knowing that white characters and readers exploit as affordances in their cognitive ecology. The third chapter, “Blurred Boundaries, Suspect Desires, and Bad Trust in the Fantastic,” underscores how dangerous the driving force the desire to know can be through an analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). The concluding chapter, “The Vulnerability of Metacognition: Thinking, or Not, Through Crisis,” extends the project’s historicization of trust in 19th-century America to today’s fraught ‘post-truth’ era through an examination of Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic work Wieland (1798). By examining the metacognitive disruptions in Wieland, I illustrate how thinking in crisis pushes us to confront the uncertainty underlying our rationality. The danger of doing so, as we see in Wieland, is a loss of control that destabilizes not just what we know, but who we are.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2024.291b
Recommended Citation
Van Gilder, Jessica Marie, "Trust and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Fictional Genres and Metacognitive Disruptions" (2024). Theses and Dissertations--English. 175.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/175
