“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union prompted social scientists and public intellectuals to ask how the bonds of social trust could be sustained by democratic nations in a newly global free market economy. The provisional answers provided by these experts in the 1990s were challenged by subsequent events, most notably the rapid proliferation of digital technology, the global financial crisis of 2008, and the political rupture signalled by the populist victories – Trump and Brexit – of 2016. More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic has prompted urgent questions about social trust, with respect to government, the economy, science, media, and fellow citizens. All of these events have contributed to the widespread feeling that we are living through a crisis in social trust.

While it has long been recognized that trust involves the faculty of imagination, little attention has to date been paid by social scientists to the insights of imaginative literature. TRUST marshals the key strengths and methods of literary studies to reshape our understanding of social trust, with a particular focus on the new modes of distributed trust that underpin social life in the global digital age. On the grounds that social trust becomes most evident only in its absence, when everyday life is thrown into crisis, the project looks to contemporary literature produced in the period since 1990 to understand how social trust functions and how it fails, with a view to identifying better, more justified, and more sustainable forms of trust.