Schwanebeck, Wieland: Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning

Unlike previous efforts that only addressed twinship as a footnote to the doppelganger, this book makes a case for the complexity of literary twinship across the literary spectrum, showing how twins have been instrumental to the formation of comedies of mistaken identity, the detective genre, and dystopian science fiction."A lively, consistently instructive guided tour of some of the most intriguing ways writers have presented twins and twinship over the past four centuries. Wieland Schwanebeck comes up with a remarkable range of different ways to think about twins-as the same yet different, as shadow selves, as clones, as our missing halves, as challenges to our personal identity-and an equally remarkable number of areas-Shakespearean comedy, Victorian detective fiction, literary adaptation, popular fictional genres, pornography, behaviorism, genetics, criminology, eugenics, ethnography, biopolitics, literary production and interpretation-that are illuminated by their handling of twins. Readers are certain to agree with him that 'once you have grasped twinship, you can never not see it again'." Prof. Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware