Contemporary British Gothic and Doublings

This thesis investigates the Gothic double in twenty-first-century British fiction through psychoanalytic, structural, and cultural lenses. Focusing on Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (2015), Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009), Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), this thesis argues that the double has evolved from a symbolic representation of repressed desires to a critical framework for exploring systemic constructions of identity. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, particularly those of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Donald Winnicott, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, this thesis analyses how doubling within characters and across narrative structures reflects the persistent haunting and anxiety surrounding systematic violence.

This study contends that contemporary Gothic fiction reanimates the double to articulate anxieties about identity fragmentation, historical trauma, maternal inheritance, class stratification, and capitalist reproduction. Through close reading of literary doubling, the chapters trace how each protagonist struggles against external forces that fragment or overwrite the self. The analysis also foregrounds how the haunted house narration becomes the site of both uncanny return and psychological containment, through which the enduring cultural anxiety that haunts Britain is revealed. By reconsidering the Gothic double through the lenses of maternal mirroring and socio-political displacement, this thesis contributes to broader discussions in Gothic studies and psychoanalysis. It concludes by proposing the double not simply as a narrative device, but as a lived strategy of navigating multiplicity, construction, and survival in the twenty-first century.