Two versions of death: The transformation of the literary corpse in Kafka and Stevenson

This essay makes the claim for Robert Louis Stevenson being a precursor of Franz Kafka in order to offer a new reading of Stevenson's 1886 'shilling shocker', Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Drawing on a wellknown letter Kafka wrote to Max Brod in 1922 about the writer's relation to his own death and an important entry from Stevenson's notebooks on the same subject, it argues that Jekyll's transformation into Hyde represents not the splitting of his (moral) personality but rather the paradoxical appearance of his death. In presenting death as a paradoxical form of transformation, Jekyll and Hyde can be read as the allegorical foreshadowing of Stevenson's own death by stroke on Samoa in 1894. When read in conjunction with Kafka's Metamorphosis, it also demands that we reconsider the theoretically vexing relation of literature to the body.