Adam Parkes

Blurred image of the arch used as background for stylistic purposes.
Professor

Adam Parkes specializes in British, Irish, and American literature from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first.  

Modern & the aristocracyHis most recent book, Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege (published in 2023 by Oxford University Press), examines literary responses to the aristocracy in the modern democratic age.  Through readings of Elizabeth Bowen, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, and Edith Wharton, Monsters analyzes the attitudes and affects that writers attributed to the British aristocracy between the world wars. Of central concern throughout are the formal and stylistic possibilities to which this subject-matter gave rise.  The coda turns to Edward St. Aubyn.   

A Sense of ShockParkes's previous book-length monographs are A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (Oxford, 2011) and Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (Oxford, 1996).  Recent articles include two on Ishiguro, one on Never Let Me Go (Modern Fiction Studies, 2021) and the second on Klara and the Sun (Foreign Literature Studies, China, 2022), as well as several on Lawrence.  "Erskine Childers and the Sense of Insecurity"  appeared in Cusp in 2023.  The intertwined themes of security and insecurity run through two other current projects: an essay on the spy novelist Len Deighton and a guest-edited special issue of South Atlantic Review (scheduled for publication in 2026).  He is also writing on particularity in Joyce and punctuation in Lawrence.     

Parkes serves on the editorial advisory boards of Modern Fiction Studies, Victorians Institute Journal, and D.H. Lawrence Review.  He is a past president of both the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) and the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America.  He is a member of the organizing committee of the upcoming international D.H. Lawrence conference in Mexico City in August 2025. 

Parkes regularly teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the 20th-Century British and Irish novel, Spy Fiction, 21st-Century British fiction, and James Joyce.  He has taught freshman seminars on Kazuo Ishiguro, Aldous Huxley, and D.H. Lawrence; Lawrence was also the subject of his most recent graduate seminar. 

Education:

Ph.D. in English, University of Rochester, 1988-1993

B.A. in English, Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, 1985-1988

Wolverhampton Grammar School, 1977-1984

Selected Publications:

Books

Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege (Oxford University Press, 2023; published on Oxford Academic, Dec. 2023).   https://global.oup.com/academic/product/modernism-and-the-aristocracy-9780192866295?lang=en&cc=us (enter code AAFLYG6 for 30% discount when ordering from global.oup.com)

A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (Oxford University Press, 2011; Oxford Academic, 2011).

Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day: A Reader's Guide (Continuum, 2001). 

Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (Oxford University Press, 1996; Oxford Academic, 2023).  Listed by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book, 1996.

 

Recent essays and articles

"Erskine Childers and the Sense of Insecurity: Impressionism and Intelligence in The Riddle of the Sands."  Special issue on "First Impressions: The Impact of Impressionism on English Literature."  Cusp: Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Cultures, vol. 1, no. 2 (2023), pp. 250-271.  Parkes_Erskine Childers & the Sense of Insecurity.pdf

"Monotony and the Masses."  Etudes Lawrenciennes, no. 54 (2022).  https://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/3144  

“Nothing New Under the Sun: Planned Obsolescence in Ishiguro’s Klara.”  Foreign Literature Studies (China), vol. 44, no. 1 (Feb. 2022), pp. 13-27.  http://fls.ccnu.edu.cn/EN/Y2022/V44/I1/1  

“Ishiguro's ‘<Strange> Rubbish’: Style and Sympathy in Never Let Me Go.”  Special issue on "Ishiguro After the Nobel."  Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 67, no. 1 (2021), pp. 171-204.  Parkes_Ishiguro's Strange Rubbish.pdf

“Stupidity, Intellect, and Hierarchy in Lawrence and Huxley.”  Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 68, no. 4 (2021), pp. 455-82. 

“Logics of Disintegration in Lawrence and Huxley.”  Etudes Lawrenciennes, no. 52 (2021).   https://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/2471

"The Ache of Nostalgia in Women in Love."  D.H. Lawrence Review, vol. 44, no. 2 (2019), pp. 33-49. 

“‘A more emotional, a more keenly analytical picture’: Impressionism, Naturalism, and Sociology in Ford Madox Ford," in The Socio-Literary Imaginary in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Britain: Victorian and Edwardian Inflections, ed. Maria K. Bachman and Albert D. Pionke (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 198-218

 

Some recent talks

"Particular Joyce,” Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, October 2024

"‘—  — —  —  — —’: Doing Dashes in Different Voices," International D.H. Lawrence Symposium, University of Paris-Nanterre, April 2024 (zoom)

"Kindness and Cruelty in Lawrence’s Fiction," D.H. Lawrence Society, UK (zoom) 

“In Praise of (in)security” (Presidential Address), South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Atlanta, Ga., November 2023

“‘Noble Ruined Haciendas’: Nostalgia and Nausea in The Plumed Serpent,” International D.H. Lawrence Symposium, University of Paris-Nanterre, April 2023

“Elizabeth Bowen, D.H. Lawrence, and a ‘New Raw Personal Social Consciousness,’” American Conference for Irish Studies, April 2022 (online)

“Eliot’s Crowned Knot: Four Quartets and the Country-House Novel,” South Atlantic Modern Language Association, November 2021 (online)

Contact Information

aparkes@uga.edu
Office: Park Hall 311
Office Hours:
Spring 2025: MWF 1.30 pm

Other Information


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