Adam Parkes

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Professor

Adam Parkes specializes in twentieth-century British, Irish and American literature.  He is also interested in the the literature of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries and in the longer history of writing in English.

Modern & the aristocracyMost of his published scholarship focuses on modernism.  His most recent book, Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege (Oxford University Press, 2023), examines literary responses to the aristocracy between the world wars. Authors considered include Elizabeth Bowen, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, and the contemporary novelist 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 UP, 2011) and Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (Oxford UP, 1996).  He has also written on Kazuo Ishiguro, contributing a book to the Continuum Contemporaries series (2001) and publishing articles in Modern Fiction Studies (2021) and the Chinese journal Foreign Literature Studies (2022).  

Reflecting longstanding interests in shock, terror and security, Parkes has written on Erskine Childers's spy novel The Riddle of the Sands (Cusp, 2023) and is currently writing on Len Deighton for a forthcoming Cambridge UP collection on literary conservatism. He has edited a special issue on (in)security for the SAMLA journal South Atlantic Review (due out in 2026) and is now editing The Cambridge Companion to John le Carré (to appear in 2027).

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. Having helped organize the 2025 D.H. Lawrence conference in Mexico City, he is chair of the Co-ordinating Committee of International Lawrence Conferences (CCILC) for 2025-28. 

Parkes teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the 20th-Century British and Irish novel, spy fiction, 21st-Century British fiction and James Joyce. He regularly offers freshman seminars, including one this semester on Lawrence's poetry.  His current graduate seminar is studying 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)

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

 

Edited volumes

The Cambridge Companion to John le Carré (to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2027)

(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."  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

"Merciless Joyce," Modernist Studies Association Conference, Boston, October 2025

"Abstraction in Lawrence's 'Tortoise' Poems," 16th CCILC-International D.H. Lawrence Conference, Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City, August 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), March 2024 

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:
Fall 2025: Thursday 12.30-2.00 pm & by appointment

Other Information


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