Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Tony Magistrale and Sidney Poger

Critical Essay by Tony Magistrale and Sidney Poger

SOURCE: Magistrale, Tony, and Sidney Poger. “Poe's Victorian Disguises: The Hound of the Baskervilles and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” In Poe's Children: Connections between Tales of Terror and Detection, pp. 45-55. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1999.

In the following essay, Magistrale and Poger argue that works such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's ”The Hound of the Baskervilles” and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde reflect Edgar Allan Poe's conception of the human psyche as the ultimate mystery.

Jekyll and Hyde is a pre-Jungian fable, a vivid illustration of the Shadow side of a decent man, that aspect of our natures whose presence we all have to acknowledge.

(Aldiss qtd. in Wolf 114)

Fifty years after Poe invented the detective story and provided the horror tale with a level of psychological intensity to which it had not been previously subjected, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis...
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