The Besieged Ego Doppelgangers And Split Identity Onscreen

Caroline Ruddell

'The Besieged Ego' critically appraises the representation of identity in contemporary film and television, with a focus on doppelgangers, doubling and split or fragmentary characters. The prevalence of non-autonomous characters in a wide variety of film and television products calls into question the very concept of a unified, 'knowable' identity. The form of the double, and cinematic modes and rhetorics used to denote fragmentary identity, is addressed in this book through a detailed analysis of texts drawn from a range of industrial and cultural contexts, but with particular attention paid to contemporary media.