The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
ISBN-10
0230371639
ISBN-13
9780230371637
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
183
Language
English
Published
1990-06-29
Publisher
Springer
Author
J. Herdman

Description

Duality and the divided mind have been a source of perennial fascination for literary artists and especially for novelists, and this is particularly true of the Romantic generation and their later nineteenth-century heirs. This book deals with the double, or Doppelgnger, as a dominant theme in the fiction of the period, and with its relation to the problem of evil. It suggests that the literary double flourished best when psychological and religious understandings of human dividedness were in harmony, and declined when they began to grow apart. Writers analysed include E.T.A.Hoffmann, James Hogg, Poe, Dostoevsky and Stevenson; the final chapter relates the theme to the psychology of Jung.

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