The magic lantern: representation of the double in Dickens

The book explores the double trope as a central area of Dickensian textuality in its relation to Victorian visual imagination and culture. First, it analyzes Dickens’s rhetoric showing the double as a linguistic construction shaped by the conflicting forces of rationality and desire and invested with the force of multiple signification. Then, it focuses on Dickensian double characterization, which symbolizes the self as a mobile, ever-shifting energy field, modelled by a number of overlapping discourses, psychological, anthropological and historical. Next, it deals with the representation of urban space, seen as a structuring background suspended between history and dream and related to the equally dichotomous construction of the self, as it constantly emerges from Dickens's use of language. Finally, it investigates a few historical issues surfacing in the texts, such as the problematic encounter with several forms of otherness and the role of Empire, in order to show their psychological and political implications and the extent of their ambivalent commitment to Victorian ideology.