The Spectacle of Twins in American Literature and Popular Culture

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The cultural fantasy of twins imagines them as physically and behaviorally identical. Media portrayals consistently reproduce the spectacle of twins who share an insular closeness and perform a supposed alikeness-standing side by side, speaking and acting in unison.

Treating twinship as a cultural phenomenon, this first comprehensive study of twins in American literature and popular culture examines their historical narrative-embedded within discourses of aberrance, experimentation and eugenics-and how it has shaped their public and personal representations in the 20th and 21st centuries.