Graduation Year
2021
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
History
Reader 1
Andrew Aisenberg
Reader 2
Thomas Koenigs
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2021 Lauren R Romero
Abstract
In the midst of the infrastructural and cultural transformations of nineteenth century Euro-American urbanization, the literary world gained a new gothic motif. The doppelgänger, a ghostly, malicious double, began to haunt the pages of stories written across Europe and the United States. In such tales, these doppelgängers contended with and navigated a world rocked by the same revolutions that urbanization had brought to the real world in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This paper surveys several of these doppelgänger tales in order to explore a connection between the physical and psychological impacts of urbanization in nineteenth century Europe and America and the contemporary literary trend of incorporating doppelgängers as a gothic motif.
Recommended Citation
Romero, Lauren, "Double Take: The Shock of Urbanization and The Doppelgänger in Nineteenth Century Euro-American Gothic Literature" (2021). Scripps Senior Theses. 1676.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1676
