Dr Adam Guy
I work at the intersections of transnational modernist studies, intellectual history, and book history: my research focuses on ideas about literature, and on how those ideas travel and are mediated. I explored these interests in my first book, The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism (OUP, 2019), which recovers the importance of the French nouveau roman to writers and publishers active in midcentury Britain as they debated what it meant to be 'new'. In relation to this project, I have also published extensively on innovative, experimental, and late modernist writers active in Britain at midcentury, including Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, and Eva Tucker. My interests in the intersection in the twentieth century of French and British culture are also explored through work on the circulation of existentialism and its ideas in Anglophone contexts: published work in this line includes a book chapter on Doris Lessing and Jean-Paul Sartre, and a journal article on Dorothy Richardson and Gabriel Marcel.
I am currently beginning work on a new project that proposes to historicize contemporary platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, and Youtube through a comparison with the publishing industry of the twentieth century. This project takes on a variety of themes, such as the publishing industry and the emergence of the data industry, the development and regulation of supranational publishing markets, the literary oeuvre as appreciating asset, and literary labour and industrial relations in publishing. As scoping exercises for this project I ran an experimental book club about privacy and the data of digital literary reading, and I am working on an article that explores midcentury debates on whether the money earned from published literary works constitutes income earned from labour or from an asset.
I also maintain a long-term interest in the modernist writer Dorothy Richardson. My work on Richardson takes in scholarly publications, editorial work, and public engagement. I am a member of the editorial boards of Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies, and of the Oxford Editions of Richardson's fiction and letters, the first volume of which was published in 2020. I am the editor of the Oxford edition of Interim and Deadlock - the fifth and sixth novels of Richardson's novel-sequence Pilgrimage - which is due for publication in 2024.
Twitter: @_Adam_Guy
PUBLICATIONS
Monograph
The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
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Journal Articles
‘Reading the Data Subject’ (as member of the Privacy Settings Collective), Post45, cluster on ‘Reading with Algorithms’, forthcoming 2023.
‘Ann Quin on Tape: Three’s Auralities’, Women: A Cultural Review, 33.1 (2022): 73-92.
‘Under Suspicion: Christine Brooke-Rose, Intelligence Work, and the Theory Wars’, Modernist Cultures, 16.4 (2021): 509–28.
‘The Noise of Mediation: Dorothy Richardson’s Sonic Modernity’, Modernism/modernity, 27.1 (2020): 81–101.
‘Editing Experiment: The New Modernist Editing and Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage’ (co-authored with Scott McCracken), Modernist Cultures, 15.1 (2020): 110–31.
‘Who Cares About the Stream of Consciousness? On Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage’, Literature Compass, 17.6 (2020).
‘Modernism, Existentialism, Postcriticism: Gabriel Marcel Reads Pilgrimage’, Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies, 9 (2017): 4–35.
‘“that’s a scientific fact”: Christine Brooke-Rose’s Experimental Turn’, Modern Language Review, 111 (2016): 936–55.
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Book Chapters
‘Walter de la Mare and Literary Impressionism in Review: From Joseph Conrad to Dorothy Richardson’, in Yui Kajita, Angela Leighton, and Anna Nickerson (eds), Walter de la Mare: Critical Appraisals (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022), pp. 213–28.
‘Contacts, Landings: The Holocaust and Late Modernist Form in Eva Figes and Eva Tucker’, in Hannah van Hove and Andrew Radford (eds), ‘Slipping through the labels’: British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945–1975 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 103–23.
‘Calder & Boyars’ in Lise Jaillant (ed.), Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 214–31.
‘Early Lessing, Commitment, the World’ in Kevin Brazil, David Sergeant, and Tom Sperlinger (eds), Doris Lessing and the Forming of History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 10–25.
‘Johnson and the nouveau roman: Trawl and Other Butorian Projects’ in Julia Jordan and Martin Ryle (eds), B.S. Johnson and Post-War Literature: Possibilities of the Avant-Garde (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 35–53.
‘Brooke-Rose, Lastness’ in G. N. Forester and M. J. Nicholls (eds), Jean-Michel Rabaté (introd.), Christine Brooke-Rose: Festschrift (Singapore: Verbivoracious Press, 2014), pp. 287–95.
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Book Reviews / Shorter Articles
Review of Julia Jordan, Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel: Oblique Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), Modern Language Review, 118 (2023).
Review of Peter Boxall and Brian Cheyette (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English Volume 7: British and Irish Fiction since 1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), Notes and Queries, 67 (2020): 149–50.
Review of Kaye Mitchell and Nonia Williams (eds), British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Review of English Studies, 71 (2020): 604–6.
‘The Richardsons in Abingdon Revisited: Three Archival Snapshots’, Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies, 10 (2018–19): 70–87.
‘Dorothy Richardson in Abingdon’, Women: A Cultural Review, 29 (2018): 267–9.
‘Interior Lives’ [Review of Terri Mullholland, British Boarding Houses in Interwar Women’s Literature: Alternative Domestic Spaces (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017)], Women: A Cultural Review, 28 (2017): 275–7.
Review of Sebastian Groes, British Fictions of the Sixties: The Making of the Swinging Decade (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), Review of English Studies, 68 (2017): 402–3.
Review of Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), Notes and Queries, 63 (2016): 653–5.
In the academic year 2022-3, I am co-convening the FHS Paper 6 Course 'Literatures Silences' with Professor Kate McLoughlin and the MSt C-Course 'Political Reading' with Professor Helen Small; I also convene my own MSt C-Course, 'Literature and the Platform', which explores literature's responses to platform capitalism and its antecedents leading back to the 1940s. My undergraduate lecture series for this year are 'Some Versions of Modernism' and 'Theory in Context'.
I have taught in Oxford at both Faculty- and college-level for some years, working with college students on Prelims Paper 1 (Introduction to Literature), Paper 3 (Literature in English 1830–1910), and Paper 4 (Literature in English 1910–Present), as well as FHS Paper 5 (Literature in English, 1760–1830). I have previously convened and co-convened the Paper 6 Courses 'Writers and the Cinema' and 'The Avant-Garde', as well as the MSt C-Courses 'Fiction in Britain Since 1945: History, Time and Memory' and 'Some Versions of Modernism'; I also convened the 'Materials Texts' strand of the MSt B-Courses. I regularly contribute to lecture circuses such as 'Adventures in Form' and 'Black Letters Matter'. I have supervised numerous undergraduate and Master's dissertations on a range of 19th-21st century writing, theory, and cinema.
