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Myriad Mirrors: Doppelgangers And Doubling In The Vampire Diaries, Kimberley Mcmahon-Coleman

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

As Samantha George notes in Chapter 4 above, mirroring is of fundamental importance in Gothic literature and film. It is also a prevalent trope in the CW network teen drama, The Vampire Diaries. The television series is itself a ‘doubling’ in that it is an adaptation of a series of novels by L. J. Smith, creating a situation wherein the same central characters inhabit the parallel townships of the novels’ Fells Church and television’s Mystic Falls, and consequently have histories which are, at times, contradictory.2 The television version also explicitly explores the concept of the doppelgänger, and thus the idea …