ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores different aspects of the Gothic double and its manifestations in Latin American literature and film from the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries. It analyzes how Seeing Red becomes by itself a literary Doppelganger which fluctuates between the conventions of autoficción and those of Gothic writings. The book deals with a comparative exploration reminding the reader that the presence of duplicity is a universal Gothic motif. It explores Coelho Netto’s novel Esphinge, which provides an example of how the Gothic operates as a discursive mode which is key to narrate modern sensibility, more particularly, in its engagement with the limits of genre, gender, and politics. The book focuses on transformations of the self, but with the emphasis on doubling the sexuality of the human body. It presents clear cases of duplicity between the human and animal bodies.
