The last Victorian or the first modernist? Classic and modern elements in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

Abstract

The purpose of this research article is to analyse how the Gothic elements work in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) in order to investigate how it is possible for the same literary piece be classified within the three categories of the Victorian period, the 1840’s Social Realism, the 1860’s Sensation Fiction, and the 1880’s/1890’s Fin-du-siècle Fantasy. The methodology chosen to delineate the research is the detachment of the passages which contain such elements. The bibliography used is mainly based on the works of the Gothic scholars Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986), and Carol Margaret Davison’s History of the Gothic Gothic Literature 1764 – 1824 (2009). The result demonstrates that the elements are used to depict the issue of the turn of the following century.