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Kate Eleanor Garland
PhD Candidate,
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Research Summary
My present research seeks to provide a comprehensive account and analysis of Robert Louis Stevenson's Calvinist imagination. By considering his extensive corpus as a whole - his life writings,… read more
Current Research
My present research seeks to provide a comprehensive account and analysis of Robert Louis Stevenson's Calvinist imagination. By considering his extensive corpus as a whole - his life writings, fiction, essays and letters - I shall undertake a reading which focuses on the theological dimensions and functions within his works. In utilising a religious lens to open up aspects hitherto obscured, my thesis will suggest that Stevenson's engagement with the Calvinist and Scottish Presbyterian tradition constitutes the unifying factor to his writings.
My interdisciplinary approach will consider Stevenson through a theological, literary, and historical, paradigm, accounting for Stevenson's thought not only in the nineteenth-century he was writing within, but the seventeenth-century he so often wrote about and explored. This research will address the historical and religious context of Scotland during this period, whilst considering Stevenson's Calvinist anthropology within a wider tradition of Scottish writers, from Walter Scot to James Robertson, and reflecting upon Stevenson's contribution to the canon and in particular his contemporary legacy.
Past Research
My past research includes a feature study on the double - doppelgänger or other - in the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and explores how this literary device can be used to communicate positive theological meaning.