New Approaches to the Doppelganger in Literature and Culture

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.

Pamela Bedore and Anita Duneer’s collection offers a fertile discussion on the timeless figure of the doppelganger in literature and culture. In addition to addressing traditional formulas for doubling in surprising texts and contexts, this manuscript also includes a timely discussion on the recent proliferation of doubles in light of new technologies and virtual scenarios.—Ilse Marie Bussing L., Senior Lecturer (Profesora Catedrática) in English Literature at the University of Costa Rica.Bedore and Duneer have compiled a truly breath-taking collection of innovative, interdisciplinary essays that not only invite discussions of the doppelgänger as a traditional trope with contemporary analytical value but posit its utility as a metaphor for anticipating our increasingly-“doubled” possible futures.—Whitney S. May, Texas State UniversityThis book provides and accessible and highly original contribution to discussions of the notion of the doppelgänger in current literature and film.—Mandy Pierlejewski, Leeds Beckett University

• 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