Adam Parkes

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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, Edith Wharton and (in a coda) Edward St. Aubyn, Monsters analyzes the attitudes and affects that writers attributed to the British aristocracy between the world wars.  

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).  He has also published a short book on Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day in the Continuum Contemporaries series (2001), as well as recent articles on Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (Modern Fiction Studies, USA, 2021) and Klara and the Sun (Foreign Literature Studies, China, 2022).  

Reflecting his longstanding interest in shock, terror and insecurity, he has recently published an article on Erskine Childers's spy novel The Riddle of the Sands (in Cusp, 2023) and is currently writing an essay on Len Deighton for a Cambridge UP collection on literary conservatism.  He is guest-editing a special issue on (in)security for the SAMLA journal South Atlantic Review, due out in 2026.  Also ongoing are a study of particularity in Joyce and two articles on Lawrence -- one concerning punctuation, the other abstraction.  

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 the subject of his most recent graduate seminar; the next will return to Joyce. 

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.

 

Guest Editor

(in)security.  Special issue of South Atlantic Review (Spring 2026, forthcoming).

 

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

 "The Life of Abstraction," International D.H. Lawrence Symposium, University of Paris-Nanterre, March 2025

"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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