Adam Parkes' research examines modern British and Irish literature in the context of social, political, and cultural developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His most recent book, A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (Oxford University Press, 2011), considers a wide range of authors — from John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Henry James, George Moore, and Oscar Wilde to Elizabeth Bowen, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf — to show why literary impressionism needs to be studied in the context of the social and political upheavals of its time. His earlier book, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship, published by Oxford in 1996 and listed by Choice as anAdam Parkes' research examines modern British and Irish literature in the context of social, political, and cultural developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His most recent book, A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (Oxford University Press, 2011), considers a wide range of authors — from John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Henry James, George Moore, and Oscar Wilde to Elizabeth Bowen, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf — to show why literary impressionism needs to be studied in the context of the social and political upheavals of its time. His earlier book, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship, published by Oxford in 1996 and listed by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book, examined the fiction of James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Radclyffe Hall in relation to censorship controversies that shaped British writing in the modernist period.
His current research focuses on modernism and the aristocracy: on representations of elite culture in British and Irish writing during the modern democratic age....more