Adam Parkes

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

His 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 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.  The coda considers the Patrick Melrose novels of Edward St Aubyn.  

Designed, in part, as an extended alternative coda, Parkes's new book project, "Styles of Obsolescence in Kazuo Ishiguro," is an archive-based study of the Japanese-born Nobel Prize winner.  Initial results have appeared as journal articles in the U.S. (Modern Fiction Studies, 2021) and China (Foreign Literature Studies, 2022).  An earlier study of Ishiguro was published in the Continuum Contemporaries series in 2001.

Parkes'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).  A recent article, "Erskine Childers and the Sense of Insecurity: Impressionism and Intelligence in The Riddle of the Sands," appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of Cusp: Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Cultures.  A new essay on insecurity in the spy fiction of Len Deighton is in the works.   

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

Parkes regularly teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the 20th-Century British and Irish novel, 21st-Century British fiction, and James Joyce.  He has taught several freshman seminars on Kazuo Ishiguro and, in Fall 2023, a graduate seminar on D.H. Lawrence.  A recent addition to his undergraduate offerings is a course in spy fiction, which will run again in the spring and summer of 2024.