You are invited to participate in the series of online online seminars
Spaces of Creativity, Creating Space
organized by the
Centre for Creativity Research
(Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Faculty of Polish Studies)
Thursday 26 January 2023
17.00 (5 p.m.) Warsaw time / 16.00 (4 p.m.) London time
10.00 (10 a.m.) Chicago time / 18.00 (6 p.m.) Kyiv time
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2187583567?pwd=Rmh3NGZxRVc0eHpqOU5JbHgxSXdhZz09
Meeting ID: 218 758 3567
PROGRAMME
- Rebecca Hutcheon (Lancaster University)
Keynote“These changing glimpses”: structure and rupture in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’
This paper argues that the accepted interpretive binaries of late-Victorian literary space (East/West; inside/outside; observation/imagination; science/fantasy; fact/fiction) are insufficient, almost misleading, when it comes to the ‘strange case’ of Stevenson’s London. The novel conveys, instead, a jumbled mid-space via a ruptured anti-narrative.
On the surface, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde seems to espouse structure: the streets and squares of West London are tightly mapped, interiors are delineated in the exacting mode of Victorian realism, the world is that of scientists, doctors and lawyers. Even the form – a collection of documents gathered by and organised around the (purportedly) detached and impartial Utterson –seems bent on conveying order.
But rupture is at the heart of the novel: of the self, of class, of space and of form. The London cityscape of Strange Case might appear navigable (and therefore mappable) but is frequently figured as clouded, foggy, mysterious in a mode than presages modernist fragmentation. The collected narratives, too, appear fragmented. They are disparate, they work backwards. Readerly expectations of realism and order are confounded. The novella transgresses generic conventions. What we’re left with is a text at once clamouring for order whilst, incrementally and covertly, undoing itself.
Dr Rebecca Hutcheon is a research fellow at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on the literature of the long-nineteenth century, cultural geography and the digital humanities. She has authored two books, Writing Place (2018) and The Place of Realism (2020). Her published works also include articles on Tennyson, Bakhtin and George Gissing, and a smart-phone app, Romantic Bristol; Writing the City. She is currently co-writing a book New Approaches for Digital Literary Mapping: Chronotopic Cartography.
- Discussion
- Centre for Creativity Research: forthcoming events
dr. hab. Mateusz Antoniuk, prof. UJ
Head of the Centre for Creativity Research