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From love scammers to fake heiresses and fraudulent businesses, deception is as much a part of contemporary culture as the media technologies, social media in particular, that facilitate fraud in the 21st century. But if we are currently experiencing a new golden age of deception, as some journalists suggest, it is not the first of its kind: 19th-century America experienced a very similar obsession with narratives of deception, prompting Edgar Allan Poe to term this period “the epoch of the hoax.” This seminar will investigate 19th-century American literature through the narratives of deception that crop up during this period, ranging from Poe’s own newspaper hoaxes to rhetorical deceptions in short stories by Mark Twain, and from cross-dressing and racial imposture in slave narratives to sensational novels about seductive female fraudsters. The seminar casts light on the foundational role played by narratives of deception in the shaping of American literature, while also linking literary history to relevant contemporary issues, including sensationalism in the media, the cultural dynamics of (dis)trust, and the aesthetic and also political affordances of fraudulence for people from marginalized groups. |
