Kate Kane

About Kate’s Research:

A character permanently ‘stranded in the present’ within Scottish culture, Mary, Queen of Scots has continued to attract intense interest and controversy in both academic and popular contexts since her execution in 1587. This PhD project explores Mary’s significance as a figure of cultural memory in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Scottish literature and culture, focusing on Mary’s embodiment of shifting perspectives on gender, religion, and nation as these issues uniquely intersect within her memorialisation.

Taking a historicist approach to Mary’s cultural representation, the Queen of Scots is considered through an innovative lens combining memory and feminist theory with an ‘imagined communities’ approach to Scottish national identity. The PhD examines Mary as a figure of memory who is constructed and reconstructed by a shared national culture according to the dynamics of memory as a collective phenomenon, and the ideological demands of the contemporary social environment.

This project ranges from the twilight of the Victorian Era to the Scottish Literary Renaissance in the early twentieth-century, to Mary’s commercialisation as a Scottish female icon in literature and material culture post-WWII. Later, analysis of Mary’s increasing commemoration by women following Liz Lochhead’s pivotal Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987) and amidst the contemporary identity politics of post-devolution Scotland will be centred.

Focusing on the development of the Marian narrative through neglected Scottish texts (including children’s literature and the popular press) and within material and consumer culture, this project will produce a substantial new analysis of Mary’s continuing afterlife within post-1900 Scotland.