The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde By Robert Louis Stevenson Historical Background • Written during the Victorian Age (1830- 1900) • Hard work, respectability, repression of self-expression, and religious conformity • Significant changes in the field of medicine and scientific experimentation occurred • Primary characters are all bachelors (prudery) Edward Hyde • Jekyll’s other nature • Pale, small, with impression of deformity • Evil, occasionally compared to an animal Dr. Lanyon • Respected physician • Friend and former colleague of Dr. Jekyll who views Jekyll’s experiments as nonsense Poole • Dr. Jekyll’s faithful servant • Concerned about his employer • Seeks Utterson’s help ANALOGIES BETWEEN STEVENSON’S & MARY SHELLEY’S NOVELS I THE FIGURE OF THE OVERREACHER - The two protagonists are scientists who overcome the limits and borders imposed to them by ethics, nature or God. Their punishment is death by exhaustion in one case, by self-destruction in the other. Both are OVERREACHERS, rebels who go beyond the limits imposed to Mankind by God or Nature, who have their prototype in Prometheus, the mythical Titan who defied Zeus stealing the fire from the Olympus. ANALOGIES BETWEEN STEVENSON’S & MARY SHELLEY’S NOVELS II FORBIDDEN SCIENCE - Both Mary Shelley, who is considered a forerunner of science - fiction, and Robert Louis Stevenson reveal deep interest in science in these works and reflect on what is now called bioethics. ANALOGIES BETWEEN STEVENSON’S & MARY SHELLEY’S NOVELS III COMPLEX NARRATIVE STRUCTURE - The two stories are told by different narrators and the reader shares different points of view. Mary Shelley's work is an epistolary novel with three narrating voices, whose narration doesn't follow a chronological sequence. It is also designed as "Chinese boxes" Stevenson's "Jekyll and Hyde", too, has a multi - narrational structure: four different narrators and a series of different points of view are proposed to the reader: 80% of the story is told by a third - person external narrator but Enfield's, Lanyon's and Jekyll's contributions are necessary, essential, to the completeness of the puzzle Mr Utterson is trying to re-compose.