New Approaches to the Doppelganger in Literature and Culture (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

Bedore, Pamela (EDT)/ Duneer, Anita (EDT)

Routledge（2026/07発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 308 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781032998978

Full Description

New Approaches to the Doppelganger in Literature and Culture addresses the pressing questions of our cultural moment about the very nature of reality. How can we grapple with rapid developments in the power of AI to impersonate, simulate, and replicate personal identities and virtual images? How do new technologies both reflect and distort our sense of our own unique identities? In what ways do we see ourselves represented in literature, film, and other media? These questions are at the heart of this collection of essays about the doppelganger—as a figure and concept that prompts us to reconsider what makes us human.

This collection locates the historical and aesthetic foundations of the doppelganger in the Narcissus myth and traces the figure's uncanny power to represent both identity schisms and duplications. It provides a series of essays on: foundational doppelgangers in Medieval poetry and early film, concepts of doubling in celebrity and author representations, cinematic erasure and reclamation of identity, and the doppelganger in popular culture. How would you approach an encounter with your doppelganger: with dread, anticipation, or something else? How about your data doppelganger, those digital versions of yourself created by you or by an algorithm?

This volume presents chapters from a variety of scholars analyzing the doppelganger in literature and film in order to examine the figure's contributions to our understandings of contemporary authorship, culture, media, political discourse, and technology.

Contents

Part 1: Approaches to the Doppelganger Over Time; Chapter 1. The Doppelganger in Literature and Culture; Chapter 2. Fractured Selves in the Old English Soul and Body; Chapter 3. Pygmalion Nightmares: Uncanny Doubles and Commodified Spaces in Mystery of the Wax Museum; Part 2: Celebrity and Author Representations; Chapter 4. Rugged Individualist or Socialist Revolutionary? Deconstructing Jack London's Doppelgangers; Chapter 5. Extra, Extra: Doubly in Print in Dashiell Hammett's Short Fiction; Chapter 6. Fact, Fiction, Memoir: Narrative Re-Imaginings of the Black Dahlia; Chapter 7. The Shadow of the Real: Doubles and the Struggle for Authenticity in Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted; Chapter 8. To "Stare at Myself, Nude, In the Mirror for a Moment": Bret Easton Ellis's Doubling and the Reflected Self; Part 3: Cinematic Erasure and Reclamation of Identity; Chapter 9. On Straightwashing: Hetero Doubles of Queer Characters in Breakfast at Tiffany's and Fried Green Tomatoes; Chapter 10. Pewma, the Everyday, and the Double Encounters of Community in Cinematic Constructions of Indigeneity in Chile and Mexico; Chapter 11. Model Minority Murder: Killing the Asian American Doppelganger in Better Luck Tomorrow; Part 4: The Doppelganger in Popular Culture; Chapter 12. (Post) Humanistic Doubling in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five; Chapter 13. Deliberate and Uncanny Detective Doppelganging in Patricia Cornwell's Postmortem and Tana French's The Likeness; Chapter 14. The Value of the Variant: Complicating the Doppelganger Tradition in Loki, Orphan Black, and The Vampire Diaries; Chapter 15. Encountering Doubles in the Virtual World of Kristoffer Borgli's Dream Scenario; Chapter 16. Copied and Divided Selves: Redoubling the Naturalist Problem of Agency in Hervé Le Tellier's The Anomaly and Apple TV's Severance; Part 5: More Doppelgangers; Chapter 17. More Doppelgangers: An Annotated List of Fiction, Film/TV, and Scholarship