Adam Parkes

Blurred image of the arch used as background for stylistic purposes.
Professor
President, SAMLA
Past President, D.H. Lawrence Society of North America

Adam Parkes specializes in British, Irish, and American literature from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first.  He regularly teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the 20th-Century British novel, 21st-Century British fiction, and James Joyce; a recent addition to his undergraduate offerings is a course in spy fiction.  

Modern & the aristocracyParkes is currently finishing one book and starting another.  Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege (to be published this year by Oxford University Press) examines literary responses to the aristocracy in the modern democratic age.  Through readings of Bowen, Ford, Huxley, Lawrence, Waugh, and Wharton, among others, Monsters analyzes the attitudes and affects that writers attributed to the British aristocracy between the world wars, and explores the formal and stylistic possibilities to which this subject-matter gave rise.  Parkes's new book project, "Styles of Obsolescence in Kazuo Ishiguro," is an archive-based study of selected novels by the Japanese-born Nobel Prize winner. 

A Sense of ShockParkes's previous book-length scholarly 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).  Other publications include Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day: A Reader's Guide (Continuum, 2001) and recent articles on two other Ishiguro novels: Never Let Me Go (Modern Fiction Studies, 2021) and Klara and the Sun (Foreign Literature Studies [China], 2022).  In progress is an article on insecurity, intelligence, and impressionism in Erskine Childers's spy novel, The Riddle of the Sands.    

Parkes serves on the editorial advisory boards of Modern Fiction Studies, Victorians Institute Journal, and the D.H. Lawrence Review.  He is President of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) for 2022-23 and Past President of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America for 2023-25. 

Education:

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

B.A. in English, Cambridge University, 1985-1988

Wolverhampton Grammar School, 1977-1984

Selected Publications:

Books

Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege (Oxford University Press, July 2023 [expected]).   https://global.oup.com/academic/product/modernism-and-the-aristocracy-9780192866295?lang=en&cc=us

A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (Oxford University Press, 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).  Listed by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book.

Recent essays and articles

"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/I1/13

“Ishiguro's ‘<Strange> Rubbish’: Style and Sympathy in Never Let Me Go.”  Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 67, no. 1 (2021), pp. 171-204.  https://muse.jhu.edu/article/786763/pdf

“Stupidity, Intellect, and Hierarchy in Lawrence and Huxley.”  Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 68, no. 4 (2021), pp. 455-82. https://muse-jhu-edu.us1.proxy.openathens.net/article/843599/pdf

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

“‘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, edited by Maria K. Bachman and Albert D. Pionke (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 198-218

"The Ache of Nostalgia in Women in Love."  D.H. Lawrence Review, vol. 44, no. 2 (2019), pp. 33-49. https://www.dhlawrencereview.org/about

"Expatriation, Snobbery, and Uncommon Commonness in Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo."  D.H. Lawrence Studies (South Korea), vol. 26, no. 2 (2018), pp. 22-49

“Elizabeth Bowen’s Mélisande.”  Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 59, no. 4 (2017), pp. 457-76. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/44866249.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A289fe3b734763725c361d8c09dfda236

Contact Information

aparkes@uga.edu
Office: Park Hall 311
Office Hours:
Spring 2023: Tuesdays & Thursdays at 2:00 p.m. and by appointment.

Other Information


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