Dr Adam Guy
Research Fellow
As well as being a Research Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Adam Guy is a member of the English Faculty.
Broadly speaking, Adam's research is materialist in its inclinations, and speaks to questions raised by transnational modernism, book history, science/technology studies, and, lately, platform studies.
Adam's main area of expertise is in innovative and experimental prose fiction of the twentieth century. He 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 he has published extensively on a range of these writers – such as Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, and Eva Tucker. His major work in this area, though, is his 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, Adam maintains a long-term interest in the British modernist writer Dorothy Richardson (1873–1957). His work on Richardson takes in scholarly publications, editorial work, and public engagement. He is 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. He is 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 2026.
Adam is 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 his 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 Adam has 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, Adam is currently working on a further article about tech memoir and its uncertain negotiations with the discourse on digital rights.
