Henry Box Brown not only mailed himself in a box from Richmond in Philadelphia in 1849, but he also remediated this experience of embodiment later in competing slave narratives, on stage, in a panorama, and through his role as a magician and mesmerist. In these four “acts,” Brown uses the representation of his experiences of Black embodiment across various media both to support and—simultaneously—to undercut the mind-centered ontology that structured the system of chattel slavery’s reduction of Blackness to mindless matter. Rather than imagine ontological drift, as Bird does, or ontological betweenness, like Forrest, Brown uses different representations of Black embodiment to imagine existence as always already ontologically doubled, as something governed by the mind-centered paradigm that demeans the body, and by the body-centered paradigm that makes the material body’s expressive agency crucial for the fullest articulation of humanity. Brown suggests that consciousness emerges simultaneously from the mind and the body, and that by carefully curating these overlapping, and doubled, forms of consciousness, Black subjects can “mind the body” in order to imagine alternatives to white culture’s dehumanizing of Blackness.

Analyses the re-animating culture of imperial Greek culture, focusing on sophistic declamations, ethopoetic exercises, ‘close encounter’ descriptions and Homeric performance. Suggests how all these spaces reveal a strong and very textually engaged awareness of the concept of ‘doubleness’ (being and not being the subject of one’s impersonation). By reading these modes alongside depictions of performance from within the Posthomerica (Nestor’s song, the song of the bards and the debate between Ajax and Odysseus) argues for the direct influence that they exerted on Quintus’ composition, providing models for how to expand creatively within the boundaries of a canonical, traditional text.

Chapters Three, Four, Five and Six focus on the emergence of explicit maps as an integral element within popular genres and thus follow a rough chronology from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Chapter Three explores the map in Adventure Fiction as it emerges in the late nineteenth century at a point when literary maps proliferate across texts and genres. This chapter offers a detailed reading of two iconic maps in Treasure Island and King Solomon’s Mines and seeks to show that visual and verbal meanings are fully integrated. In the final sections of the chapter, the concept of doubling in map and text is taken to its furthest extreme and works to create a new genre – the spy thriller. This is analysed with reference to John Buchan and full analysis of Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands. (139)