The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Roberet Louis Stevenson (Nebraska, £9.50 in UK)

In this elegant new edition of Stevenson's masterpiece, illustrated with a dozen suitably sombre wood engravings by Barry Moser…

In this elegant new edition of Stevenson's masterpiece, illustrated with a dozen suitably sombre wood engravings by Barry Moser, Joyce Carol Oates introduces the story with the didactic condescension of Freudian hindsight. Unlike the author, to whom the fantasy came whole in a nightmare, Ms Oates is able academically to analyse its psychological and sociological elements. Dr Jekyll is a "typically Victorian middle-class" superego; Mr Hyde is a rebellious hairy id. She says the "visionary starkness" of the 1886 novella "anticipates that of Freud in such late melancholy meditations as Civilization and Its Discontents (1929-30); there is a split in man's psyche between ego and instinct, between civilization and `nature', and the split can never be healed. Freud saw ethics as a reluctant concession of the individual to the group, veneer of a sort overlaid upon an unregenerate primordial self." The editors of university presses sometimes apparently feel obliged to offer this sort of interpretative waffle. The story itself remains a horripilant marvel.