Unlike previous efforts that have only addressed literary twinship as a footnote to the doppelganger motif, this book makes a case for the complexity of literary twinship across the literary spectrum. It shows how twins have been instrumental to the formation of comedies of mistaken identity, the detective genre, and dystopian science fiction. The individual chapters trace the development of the category of twinship over time, demonstrating how the twin was repeatedly (re-)invented as a cultural and pathological type when other discursive fields constituted themselves, and how its literary...