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LSE Literary Festival - Jekyll & Hyde: Law, Science, Psychology

Saturday 13 February 2010 | 1 hour 21 minutes 10 seconds

Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde develops an extraordinarily rich intersection between literary fiction, legal norms and the scientific imagination. This panel discussion brings together legal academics, psychoanalytical theorists and specialists in nineteenth-century literature in a conversation focused on the historical and cultural significance themes in the novel. The discussion will span the emergence of the new science of criminology, late nineteenth-century anxieties about the permeability of social divisions, the consistency of scientific and popular theories of monstrosity, degeneration and depravity, and Stevenson's dismay that he had been turned into a professional author by the success of Jekyll and Hyde.