Seeking Mr. Hyde: Studies in Robert Louis Stevenson, Symbolism, Myth, and the Pre-Modern

by Tom Hubbard

From Edinburgh to Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scot who became a world citizen; as a writer he has a large following in many countries. The interlinked studies in this volume deploy his work as the base for an exploration of cultural crosscurrents in the late 19th century and beyond, suggesting relationships with such European figures as Dostoyevsky, Rilke and Jung. Particular attention is paid to Stevenson's bearings on the Symbolist movement, as evident in his association with the French writer Marcel Schwob. Concentrating initially on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and on puritan repression versus unbridled energy, the book points to the deeper universal significance of the Hyde figure and its related archetypes in other works by Stevenson and throughout Scottish, English, European, American and Third World literatures and cultures. With chapters entitled 'Hellish Energy', 'Masks and Mirrors', 'The Damnation of Faust' and 'Underground and Labyrinth', this book is for those who are fascinated by a writer at once approachable and enigmatic.

115 pages, Perfect Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Tom Hubbard FCLIP (born 1950) was the first librarian of the Scottish Poetry Library and is the author, editor or co-editor of over thirty academic and literary works.

From 2000 to 2004, he was editor of the Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation (BOSLIT) , a research project of Edinburgh University, based at the National Library of Scotland. He is also an honorary research fellow in the Department of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow (2004 – 2007), an honorary fellow in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh (2005 – 2008), and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (FCLIP) (elected 2006). In 2017 he became a Fellow of the Scottish Association for Literary Studies.

His first novel Marie B. (Ravenscraig Press, 2008), based on the life of the Ukrainian-born painter Marie Bashkirtseff, was longlisted for a Saltire Society book award. His recent book-length poetry collections are The Chagall Winnocks (2011) and Parapets and Labyrinths (2013), both from Grace Note Publications, as well as a pamphlet collection, The Nyaff (2012), from Windfall Books of Kelty, Fife. An essay on the Scottish poet Harvey Holton (1949 - 2010) was published as a pamphlet by Fras Publications as Harvey Holton: Bard, Makar, Shaman (2013). He has edited a volume of essays, The Poetry of Baudelaire, which was published by the New York publisher Grey House in 2014. He has also made English and Scots versions of poems by the nineteenth-century Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov for an anthology After Lermontov, edited by Peter France and Robyn Marsack (Carcanet 2014). He is on the editorial board of the journal Scottish Affairs, and an honorary visiting fellow at the University of Edinburgh Institute of Governance, where he worked on a “Scotland and Europe” project with Dr Eberhard Bort.