In his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1800), William Wordsworth warned that
With a few minor tweaks, this paragraph might be used to describe the state of our collective minds in 2024, our powers of discrimination so blunted that we have become accustomed to living with a category called “fake news.”
What Peter Brooks in Seduced by Story calls a “narrative takeover of reality” has, of course, long been a central feature of modern life, as documented by Charles Mackay and others and taken up, specifically with reference to American life in the nineteenth century, in such novels as Herman Melville’s Confidence Man and Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson.2 Examples of the proliferation and effects of such narratives can be found at numerous sites at numerous times, as Mackay documents, but the nineteenth century appears to have had a particular affinity for them—seeded by the rapid growth of financial markets,...
