The Double and the Other

This book employs the novel as a model of the workings of imagination and projection in the construction of our ideological definitions of identity. The self's unity is shown to be a pseudo-unity achieved through the projection, transformation and tabooing of its own otherness. It examines the double as an epitome of the 19th century and charts its rise and fall in the fiction of the period. The centre-piece of the book is a long essay on Conrad, whose quest for identity through the embrace of non-identity is interpreted as an uneasy synthesis of the contradictions of the "fin-de-siecle" (eg. symbolism and naturalism). The book concludes with a consideration of the related syntheses of two postwar authors from Central Europe, Milan Kundera and Andrzej Kusniewicz. Paul Coates is the author of several books including "Words After Speech - a Comparative Study of Romanticism and Symbolism".