Dr Adam Guy

To date I have worked primarily on innovative and experimental prose fiction of the twentieth century. My research takes transnational modernism and book history as its major points of reference. My first book, The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism (OUP, 2019), 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 late modernist novelists who were active in Britain in the 1950s-70s, 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.

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 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 ‘Materials 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.