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This study explored how people publically engage with a politicized science issue in a social media environment. In exploring this engagement, this studied identified new types of pseudo-activism phenomena generated by participants and proposed the concept of instant activism. Instant activism suggests that sensational cues initiate heuristic information processing in the lay public. This study suggested that instant publics perform supportive actions as a reaction to instant activism. Further, this study examined the effect of social media hoaxes as a non-profit organization's wicked tool. For purposes of this study, GMO (genetically modification organisms) labeling in the US was explored as the politicized science issue. Grounded in two different theories, this study empirically examined both the perceptual and behavioral consequences of the new type of activism for the publics involved. Using motivated reasoning theory, Study 1 explored the development of instant activism by following the individuals’ cognitive process. Results demonstrated that exposure to a hoax strategy had a significant impact on motivating participants to quickly process and respond to GMO labeling issues. Study 2 addressed the behavioral aspects of the instant public, building on the situational theory of problem solving. Results indicated that exposure to a hoax increased an individual’s active communicative actions but had no effect on that individual’s passive actions and embedded principles regarding GMO labeling issues. This early attempt to empirically examine social media hoaxes and GMO labeling issues discussed the theoretical and practical implications of the results.

Horizon Cross: A Parafictional History Through Photographs is a body of work that dwells within the intersection between truth and fiction in photography. It is informed by the history of hoax photographs and my fascination with the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and black holes, the space-time boundary of which is known as an event horizon. I have imagined into being a community in northern Ontario Province, equipped with the technology of the mid-nineteenth century but also with concepts far ahead of their time. To portray the inhabitants of Horizon Cross I have created photographic portraits of fictional people that I am presenting as cabinet cards, in order to reference a specific moment in time through the use of historically appropriate photographic processes as well as to explore portraiture and create photographic artifacts. I have combined historically appropriate imagery in the cabinet cards with imagery unique to Horizon Cross. Like my concept of fact and fiction, my technical process is a hybrid of modern digital and traditional chemical based photography: it is important that the cabinet cards are albumen prints mounted on cardstock that have been letter pressed with era appropriate graphic design and fonts. While I may have created the individual portraits, I have assembled them collectively as evidence of the existence of Horizon Cross.

Readers often have passionate responses (both positive and negative) to books that first manipulate them into believing a seeming ‘truth’ about the narrative only to later discover that they have been deliberately fooled. In most cases readers are aware of the fictional status of these novels, which will be termed ‘trickeries’. Why, then, do readers exhibit such outrage towards changes in a world which is known to be invented? This thesis argues that in the case of trickeries the conventional reading process (which encompasses readerly expectations as set up by the narrative in conference with the reader’s knowledge about narrative and fiction) is used against the reader as the means through which they might be manipulated for a variety of purposes. Ongoing contentious debates surrounding certain narratological phenomena have tended to focus on conventional fiction as the basis for extrapolating data in support of various arguments. This study exploring narrative trickeries – the literary aberrations, the marked fiction – provides a new perspective on these debates, and in the process reveals fresh insights into the conventional processes of writing and reading fiction. This thesis explores how historically-shifting and supposedly dichotomous notions such as ‘truth/lies’ and ‘fiction/nonfiction’ inform the current circumstances in which contemporary readers consume literature. It is argued that this context provides the necessary conditions for a great proliferation of contemporary ‘trickeries’. In this thesis different types of trickeries are identified and anatomised in order to explore four different narratological phenomena which divide scholarly opinion: the narrative communication model; the storyworld; fictionality; and the paratext. In this pursuit, a narratological analysis is conducted of four contemporary English-language texts: Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth (the unexpected twist); John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (the frustrated-expectations novel); William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (the fictional(ised) memoir); and, Helen Demidenko’s The Hand that Signed the Paper (the hoax). These analyses of trickeries provide an understanding of not only the textual mechanics at play (and thus the role of the author), but also of readerly responses, and thus the active, agential role the contemporary reader plays in the holistic process of contemporary fiction.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym stands out among Edgar Allan Poe's body of work as his only novel. It also stands out in the fact that it has received comparatively little attention from scholars, owing at least in part to the idea that it is a literary failure on Poe's part. Analysis reveals quite the contrary, however, as the novel is not a disjointed narrative masquerading as travel literature, but rather it is a satire of the genre of travel literature. Poe was driven to write the novel at the behest of his publisher, who also encouraged Poe to plagiarize "authentic" travel literature for his own narrative in order to create a more saleable product. Poe borrowed heavily from Benjamin Morrell's A Narrative of Four Voyages and fashioned his own novel as a satire of Morrell's reportedly true account. I argue that Poe's novel contains elements of hoax, satire, and parody and was written to satirize a genre of literature that Poe originally had no interest in pursuing.

When the writers of the American Romantic period were eschewing the Enlightenment values of reason and objectivity in favor of subjective, individual human experience, Edgar Allan Poe clung to rationality and claimed that it is a vital tool in the creation of art and in the quest for spiritual enlightenment. Critics, however, have long disputed whether Poe sincerely valued science and rationality or if he treated those concepts with irony and destabilized any knowledge that his characters acquire through rational, empirical truth seeking. This thesis seeks to explain how Enlightenment values figure in Poe's vision of art and the cosmos and to dispute the postmodern interpretations that claim that Poe's valorization of rationality and its products (namely science and technology) is ironic. To that end, I investigate, specifically, the connection of Poe's positivistic (rather than phenomenological) philosophy to his theological vision. The successful application of rational principles by Poe's narrators is consistently rendered in language and imagery suggestive of the divine, and it results in the spiritual enlightenment of the characters. Chapter one of this thesis examines Poe's science fiction against the philosophical backdrop established by Eureka and 'Sonnet — To Science' and argues that as the narrators apply rationality successfully, they come to resemble the God with whom they seek to commune. Chapter two reads Poe?s detective tales as allegories assigning cosmic significance to the concepts of reason, embodied by the God-like C. Auguste Dupin, and unreason, embodied by Dupin's adversaries.