A Discourse Analysis of Lombroso's "Criminal Man" in Stevenson's "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde"

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature, Works, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, language: English, abstract: The gothic romance Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson is a great example to show how the fear of degeneration could be portrayed in literature and how these signs could be examined by means of the new developed sciences. Therefore, this seminar paper will focus on a discourse analysis as critical approach in terms of Michel Foucault, to show how the discourses of criminal anthropology and evolutional biology are captured in the novel, in which contexts they are embedded and which functions they could serve.