New Approaches to the Doppelganger in Literature and Culture
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- ISBN 9781032998978
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 28 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Pamela Bedore is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches courses in American literature, popular literature, and gender theory. She has published widely on genre fiction and pedagogy, including Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction (Palgrave, 2014), Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature (Great Courses, 2017), and The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Crime Fiction (Routledge, 2024).
Anita Duneer is Professor of English at Rhode Island College, where she teaches American and global literatures. Her scholarship has appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Literary Realism (2019), Studies in American Naturalism, and American Literary Realism, among other places. Her monograph, Jack London and the Sea (U of Alabama P, 2022), merges interests in literary seafaring and naturalism. She is also book review editor for Studies in American Naturalism.
