Dr Tara Stubbs has recently completed a monograph, American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–1955: the politics of enchantment (MUP, 2013). The monograph discusses how modernist American writers (including Fitzgerald, Moore, O’Neill, Steinbeck and Stevens) engaged with Irish culture, and underlines the importance of Ireland as a locus of inspiration for American modernism.
Associated projects include an ongoing, collaborative project on ‘The idea of influence in American literature’, which began with a conference at Oxford (March 2010); this led to a ‘special issue’ of Comparative American Studies (June 2011). Another project discusses the modernist Irish poet and art critic Thomas MacGreevy. The chapter, ‘“So kind you are, to bring me this gift”: Thomas MacGreevy, American modernists and the gift of “Irishness”’, will be published in The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy: A Critical Reappraisal, ed. Susan Schreibman (Continuum, 2013). I have also written a chapter, ‘W.B. Yeats and the Ghost Club’, on Yeats’s involvement in the esoteric London society; this will be published in Irish Writing London, Vol. 1, ed. Tom Herron (Bloomsbury, 2013).
Her new research is a biographical project on the publishing career of Harold Macmillan, for which she has recently been awarded a John Fell Fund award. Entitled ‘Macmillan and his authors: a reassessment of the publishing career of Harold Macmillan’, it will use Macmillan’s correspondence with a range of high-profile authors to illustrate his importance to early twentieth century letters. Biographers have tended to dismiss Macmillan’s years in publishing (her research will focus mainly on 1921–38) as a dull preamble to his political career, but letters reveal that he was a shrewd publisher, helping shape the way we read writers like Hardy, Kipling, O’Casey and Yeats.
