Dr Adam Guy
Broadly speaking, my research is materialist in its inclinations, and speaks to questions raised by transnational modernism, book history, science/technology, and, lately, platform studies.
My main area of expertise is in innovative and experimental prose fiction of the twentieth century. I started off with an interest in the loose grouping of late modernist novelists that emerged in the British literary field of the 1950s–70s, and I have published extensively on a range of these writers – such as Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, and Eva Tucker. My major work in this area, though, is my book, The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism (OUP, 2019), which recovers the importance of the French 'new novel' to writers and publishers active in midcentury Britain as they debated what it meant to be 'new'.
Relatedly, I maintain a long-term interest in the British modernist writer Dorothy Richardson (1873–1957). 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 2025.
I am currently making steps towards work on a large-scale project that proposes to historicize contemporary platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, and Youtube through a comparison with the publishing industry of the twentieth century. Finding a line of flight from the work on publishing history that went into my first book, this project would take 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 have been exploring the more recent reading and writing cultures that have emerged with platformization, running a reading group centred on questions of privacy and the data of digital reading, and, with members of that group, co-writing an experimental article on reading using the Amazon Kindle app. Extending some of the ideas about the 'data subject' that emerged from the latter article, I am currently working on a further article about tech memoir and its uncertain negotiations with the discourse on digital rights.
Twitter/X: @_Adam_Guy
PUBLICATIONS
Monograph
The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
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Scholarly Edition
The Oxford Edition of the Works of Dorothy Richardson, Volume VI: Pilgrimage 5 & 6 – Interim and Deadlock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025).
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Journal Articles
‘Reading the Data Subject’ (as member of the Privacy Settings Collective), Post45, cluster on ‘Reading with Algorithms’, <https://post45.org/2023/12/reading-the-data-subject/>.
‘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
‘Open Windows: Teaching Mary Seacole’, Victorian Review, forum on ‘How We Teach Today’, 49.1 (2023): 33–6.
Review of Julia Jordan, Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel: Oblique Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), Modern Language Review, 118 (2023): 381–2.
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.
Teaching is the best, most valuable thing that I do in my job: that is clear to me. I never cease to learn from and to be inspired by the forms of collective knowing and feeling that emerge when we gather in groups big and small to discuss literature. At Worcester College, I teach Prelims Paper 1 (Introduction to Literature), Paper 3 (Literature in English 1830–1910), and Paper 4 (Literature in English 1910–Present); having taught in the Oxford college system for some years, I also have extensive experience of teaching FHS Paper 5 (Literature in English, 1760–1830). At Faculty level, I have convened and co-convened the Paper 6 Courses 'Writers and the Cinema', 'The Avant-Garde', and 'Literature's Silences', as well as the MSt C-Courses 'Fiction in Britain Since 1945: History, Time and Memory', 'Some Versions of Modernism', 'Political Reading', and 'Literature and the Platform'; I also convened the 'Material Texts' strand of the MSt B-Courses. My own lectures series include 'Some Versions of Modernism' and 'Theory in Context'; 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, as well as acting as co-supervisor for doctoral theses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century topics.
