Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Duality and the divided mind have been a source of perennial fascination for literary artists and especially for novelists, and this is seen to be particularly true of the Romantic generation and their later 19th century heirs.;This book deals with the double, or "doppelganger" 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 analyzed include E.T.A.Hoffmann, James Hogg, Poe, Dostoevsky and Stevenson and the final chapter relates the theme to the psychology of C.G.Jung.