Begin by distinguishing the genre of composition and whether it is a primary or secondary work.

The review should then provide an extended response to the following four questions: what did the book teach you about the period under study? What specific ways does the book provide historical context, whether primary or secondary, that is unique to the era. Does the authors perspective corroborate or revise the standard view of the period. What are the books strengths and weaknesses?

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The unknown and incomprehensible became more popular than they had been since the early romantic era.

The core of social science was the study of the ascent of man from a primitive state to the present, and the rational understanding of that present.

-The crisis of reason is most obvious in psychology, at least insofar as it tried to come to terms not with experimental situations, but with the human mind as a whole. What remained of the solid citizen pursuing rational aims by maximizing personal utilities, if this pursuit was based on a bundle of instincts like those of animals, if the rational mind was only a boat tossed on the waves and currents of the unconscious, or even if rational consciousness was only a special kind of consciousness.

Robert Louis Stevensons book Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a work which clearly embodies the interests of fin-de-siecle European society. Published in 1886, this work of fiction deals with this periods obsession with the subconscious and rationality, with nontraditional science, and the unknown power of the mind. It is a primary work from this period, and although it is not set in a particular year, its writing implies the story to be either contemporary to its society or recent events.

Stevensons book primarily deals with the idea of mans relationship to his own morality, through the example of the duality present within Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde.

Fin-de-siecle Europe was a period riddled with paradox. On the one hand, reforms in government, societal structure and improvements in education created more logical, rational control over the outer world, but at the same time discoveries in science and the study of humans was beginning to focus on how little actually was known about the brain, and what controlled behavior. Although it was clear that humans were individuals with complex reasoning skills, this did not, in fact, mean that individuals behaved rationally or that their reasoning necessarily always controlled their actual behavior. It was during this period that a great interest in the idea of the subconscious, the psyche, and simply the irrational and unknown became very apparent. New ideas of how the brain and body related, new interest in connecting to the subconscious parts of the brain such as through hypnosis, and new diagnoses of mental conditions such as hysteria are all examples of this new fixation.