Confidence Sans Bound

This dissertation draws on contemporary philosophical and sociological approaches to trust and engages them in a dialog with literary, poetological, and philosophical texts from the nineteenth century. In doing so it seeks to explore both what other disciplines have to offer to literary studies with regard to the interpretation of trust as a literary motif, as well as to show how literary texts evoke compelling scenarios in which the conceptual and semantic complexities of the phenomenon of trust take on theatrical, rhetorical, and narrative forms that can both illustrate and challenge sociological or philosophical claims. Close readings of texts by Ludwig Tieck, Heinrich von Kleist, Franz Grillparzer, and Friedrich Nietzsche offer new interpretations of canonical texts and discuss the relationship of trust to aesthetics, cultural memory, mythography, and performativity.