Social anxiety and scientific progress in the Late Victorian gothic fiction: Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

In this thesis study, Bram Stoker?s Dracula and Robert Louis Stevenson?s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are analyzed in relation to the time period they were written in according to the literary critical approach of New Historicism. In the analysis of these works, literary texts, texts that provide historical information and information about the life of the authors are read in parallel to each other and thus the methods of the New Historicist approach are used. The thesis is composed of three chapters apart from the introduction and conclusion parts.Following the introduction part where the subject of the thesis and the emergence and the particulars of the New Historicist approach are told, the phases and changes that Gothic novel went through between the 18th and the 20th centuries, and the social, political and cultural structure of the Victorian England are displayed in the first chapter. In the second chapter, Victorian period?s scientific innovations, inventions and other technological progresses that affected the daily life are told initially. Then the social structure of the period, urbanization, industrialization and the hardships accompanying it, and the anxieties and depressions which are the results of these hardships are revealed. In the light of the information provided in the previous chapters, how England of the Late Victorian period is reflected, and how the scientific progresses and the social changes in this period are observed, in these works, are the subjects that are discussed in the third and the last chapter.Finally, as asserted by the New Historicist criticism, no text of history can be objective, and it is quite possible to read Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as historical texts that provide histories of their time from alternative points of view though they are literary works, and moreover non-canonical.