Dr Adam Guy

Adam Guy
Departmental Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature
adam.guy@ell.ox.ac.uk

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'.

 

I am presently at work on two new projects. The first is a monograph, titled Institutional Situations: Existentialism and Transnational Anglophone Literature. This book shows how in the middle of the twentieth century and in various spaces across the Anglophone world, the vocabulary and concepts of French existentialism and its German antecedents circulated prominently within a range of literary institutions. The project looks at institutions such as UNESCO, decolonial orgnanizations, university philosophy, theatre companies, and literary magazines. It takes in writers including John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, Elizabeth Hardwick, C. L. R. James, Iris Murdoch, and Stephen Spender. 

 

Secondly, I am in the early stages of developing a broader project that proposes to historicize contemporary platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google through a comparison with the publishing industry of the twentieth century. The 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 am working on an article about literary writers and tax avoidance, as well as running an experimental book club about privacy and the data of digital literary reading.

 

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. 

 

Twitter: @_Adam_Guy

 

PUBLICATIONS

Monograph

The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 

 

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Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

‘Ann Quin on Tape: Three’s Auralities’, Women: A Cultural Review, forthcoming 2022. 

‘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, forthcoming 2022).

‘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 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.
 

 

At Harris Manchester College, I teach 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). My lectures in the English Faculty focus on modernism beyond its traditional definition (for example in its late and global forms) and Theory. I previously co-convened the 'Writers and the Cinema' Paper 6 option for finalists; I am currently the convenor of the Paper 6 option, 'The Avant-Garde' (which I have also co-convened with Professor Rebecca Beasley). At Master's level I have convened the 'Material Texts' B-Course for students on the MSt programmes 1900-Present Day, World Literatures in English, and English and American Studies; I also co-convened the MSt C-Course option 'Fiction in Britain Since 1945: History, Time and Memory'. In the academic year 2021-22 I am convenor of the MSt C-Course 'Some Versions of Modernism'. I have supervised numerous undergraduate and Master's dissertations on a range of 19th-21st century writing, theory, and cinema.

In Oxford, I have held college lectureships at St Hilda's, University, and Wadham Colleges. From mid-2016 to early 2019 I was the Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the Dorothy Richardson Editions Project - a multi-institution collaboration, funded by the AHRC, with the aim of producing scholarly editions of Richardson's fiction and letters. 

 

  

Publications