A leading authority on the literature of the Victorian period, he published biographies of William Makepeace Thackeray and George Meredith as well as a panoramic study of the English novel.
The residual Stevenson household included and was largely supported by Mabel's brother, George Cary, and in 1918 they removed to Vancouver so that Lionel (then known as Leo, which he came to dislike) could attend the University of British Columbia.
[2] Stevenson was appointed an instructor at Berkeley following the award of his doctorate, and in 1930 he accepted a position as professor and chairman of the English department at Arizona State Teachers College, becoming a naturalised American citizen in the same year.
Stevenson took the opportunity for further study and obtained a place at the University of Oxford where, as a student of St Catherine's, he proceeded to a BLitt degree in 1935, submitting a thesis on Sydney, Lady Morgan, and being examined by Edmund Blunden and C. S. Lewis.
[5] He believed Canadian literature was at an early phase of evolution, saying it had yielded no great novels or plays because these were sophisticated forms driven by the intricacies of social relations, whereas the nation's poetry had flowered as a result of his countrymen's "genuine communion with nature in her pristine power, where civilization has never intruded her confusions".
He had been a member of the Toronto Theosophical Society from its foundation in 1924,[7] and the impact of Darwinism on literature (whereby, in Stevenson's words, "Man became a mere product of the same forces which had shaped the rest of the Cosmos"[8]) became central to his thought and work during the 1920s.
[9] Stevenson noted that Browning and Tennyson "startlingly anticipated the evolutionary theory in their early poems, only to shrink from its later developments", whereas George Meredith "had little perception of the idea till the scientists announced it" but then "devoted himself to it unstintingly".
[10] The book, characterised as "a summary of poetic philosophy in England for the past hundred years",[11] was immediately influential and "helped shape the interdisciplinary field of science and poetry".
[14] His lectures often contained a touch of drama, in the form of his graphic readings of poetry, and he strongly encouraged those students intending to become teachers to perform in plays in order to develop good voices.
He wrote introductions for reprints of novels by Thackeray, Meredith, John Galsworthy and George Moore, compiled the first published version of Victorian Fiction: A Guide to Research, and contributed to Encyclopedia Americana and other leading works of reference.