Professor Adam Piette
School of English
Professor of Modern Literature


+44 114 222 8494
Full contact details
School of English
Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
- Profile
-
I did my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Cambridge, with a PhD on prose rhymes and the representation of memory in French and Irish modernist texts.
I taught at the Universities of Paris XIII, Geneva and Lausanne for ten years whilst turning the thesis into an OUP book — Remembering and the Sound of Words (Oxford University Press, 1996) — and publishing a study of Second World War fiction and poetry, Imagination at War (Macmillan, 1995).
I then worked as a lecturer then Reader at the University of Glasgow between 1997 and 2005, where I specialised in 20th century teaching in American and English literature and worked closely with Willy Maley on teaching creative writing at MA level, helping found and run the Edwin Morgan Centre for Creative Writing.
In 2003, I was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship funding a book on Cold War writing: The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). I co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) with Mark Rawlinson. More recently, I have published articles on Beckett, Joyce, Nabokov, the war story, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, postwar espionage fiction, 20th century poetry.
I also am general editor of the student creative writing magazine, Route 57, and co-edit the poetry journal, Blackbox Manifold.
- Research interests
-
I am working on other aspects of Cold War culture, and help run the Cultures of the Cold War network.
I am also currently researching Beckett and am planning a series of articles on Beckett and the French Cold War, Beckett and the maternal, Beckett and reader response. I am also researching espionage fiction, contemporary poetry, the Cold War and the construction of Europe.
- Publications
-
Books
Edited books
Journal articles
- Rebecca West and the Double Agent. Modernist Cultures, 16(4), 469-487.
- Muriel Spark and fake news. Textual Practice, 32(9), 1577-1591. View this article in WRRO
- La violence dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett: entre langage et corps / Violence in the work of Samuel Beckett: between language and body. French Studies, 72(3), 463-464. View this article in WRRO
- Lobotomies and Botulism Bombs: Beckett’s Trilogy and the Cold War. Journal of Medical Humanities, 37(2), 161-169.
- Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading. By Clive Scott. Pp. xi + 226. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Hb. £55. Translating the Perception of Text: Literary Translation and Phenomenology. By Clive Scott. Pp. 207. Oxford: Legenda, 2012. Hb. £45.. Translation and Literature, 23(3), 424-427.
- View this article in WRRO
- open sesame; Dionysus Crucified; The Backlists; Fair’s Fair. European Journal of English Studies, 17(2), 214-216.
- The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer and Petrarch to Homer and Logue. By Matthew Reynolds. Pp. 372. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Hb. £50.Poetry and Translation: The Art of the Impossible. By Peter Robinson. Pp. 196. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. Hb. £65.. Translation and Literature, 21(2), 275-282.
- Beckett, affect and the face. Textual Practice, 25(2), 281-295. View this article in WRRO
- Contesting Realms of Memory in Early Cold War France: Tulle, Oradour and Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting. Theory, Culture & Society, 27(5), 86-106.
- Claude Vigée: Chants de l'absence / Songs of Absence. Translated by Anthony Rudolf. Pp. 56. London: Menard Press/King's College London, 2007. Pb. £6. Claude Esteban: A Smile Between the Stones / Sur la Dernière Lande. Translated by John Montague. Pp. 56. Mayfield, East Sussex: Agenda Editions, 2008. Pb. £7.99. Guy Coffette: Charlestown Blues: Selected Poems. Translated by Marilyn Hacker. Pp. 56. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Hb. £18.. Translation and Literature, 18(2), 269-275.
- Hot Rocks And The Uranium Girl: Nabokov’s Lolita. Cultural Politics, 4(3), 309-329.
- Pound’s ‘The Garden’ as Modernist Imitation: Samain, H.D., Lowell. Translation and Literature, 17(1), 21-46. View this article in WRRO
- The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. By Odd Arne Westad (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005) 484 pp. $35.00 cloth $19.99 paper. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 38(2), 258-259.
- Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, $27.95). ISBN 0 231 12952 1. Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, £45.00). ISBN 0 521 82072 3.. Journal of American Studies, 38(3), 503-506.
- Introduction. Translation and Literature, 12(1), 1-17.
- Contemporary American Playwrights. By Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. ix + 440. £15.95 Pb. £42.50 Hb. Modern American Drama, 1945–2000. By Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. £15.95 Pb. £40.00 Hb.. Theatre Research International, 27(1), 97-119.
- Mais, quand-même, Monsieur, vous exagérez!. The Cambridge Quarterly, XXI(2), 174-177.
- Book Review: Sylvia Townsend Warner, English Climate: Wartime stories (London: Persephone Books, 2020; ISBN: 978-1-91026-327-3), with a preface by Lydia Fellgett. The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 21(2).
- ‘All across Europe it had come’: The Black Death and Fascism in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them. The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 21(1), 13-30.
- Ending the Mother Ghost: Beckett's Ill Seen Ill Said and Rockaby. Complutense Journal of English Studies, 22(0). View this article in WRRO
Chapters
- Baldwin’s communicating cats (pp. 1099-1115). Informa UK Limited
- Beckett’s Poetry and the Radical Absence of the (War) Dead In Brophy J & Davies W (Ed.), Samuel Beckett's Poetry (pp. 189-202). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Cold War Poetry and Migrant Writing, The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature (pp. 345-365). Springer International Publishing
- View this article in WRRO
- Poetry, the Early Cold War and the Idea of Europe, British Literature in Transition, 1940–1960: Postwar (pp. 161-175). Cambridge University Press
- View this article in WRRO
- Sacrifice and the Inner Organs of the Cold War Citizen In Houen A & Schramm J (Ed.), Sacrifice and Modern War Literature: The Battle of Waterloo to the War on Terror Oxford: Oxford University Press. View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- 17. The Fictions of Nuclear War, from Hiroshima to Vietnam, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature (pp. 160-171). De Gruyter
- Introduction: Genres, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature (pp. 475-478). De Gruyter
- Introduction: Spaces, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature (pp. 427-430). De Gruyter
- ‘Cast A Cold Eye’, The Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats (pp. 281-296). Oxford University Press
Book reviews
- Revisioning Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Decadent Turn. By S. E. GontarskiBeckett’s Political Imagination. By Emilie Morin. French Studies, 73(3), 479-480.
- Dear World & Everyone In It: New Poetry in the UK. European Journal of English Studies, 18(3), 341-347.
- Illuminations. EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES, 16(2), 175-180.
- Writing into the Cold War West. THEORY CULTURE & SOCIETY, 28(7-8), 390-395.
- Eugene Jolas: Critical Writings, 1924–1951 ed. by Klaus H. Kiefer and Rainer Rumold (review). James Joyce Quarterly, 48(4), 782-784.
- Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry 1945–1960 (review). Modernism/modernity, 17(4), 953-955.
- L'Imaginaire melancolique de Samuel Beckett de 'Murphy' a 'Comment c'est'. French Studies, 64(3), 363-364.
- Collected Critical Writings. EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES, 14, 191-121.
- Stéphane Mallarmé: Sonnets, translated by David Scott. Pp. 128. Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2008. Pb. £9.95.. Translation and Literature, 18(1), 130-137.
- Alexander Pushkin: Eugene Onegin, translated by Tom Beck. Translation and Literature, 16(1), 119-125.
- BECKETT AT BECK AND CALL. Essays in Criticism, 56(4), 400-409.
- The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, edited by Mary Ann Caws. Translation and Literature, 15(1), 136-142.
- A Fine Line: New Poetry from Eastern and Central Europe, edited by Jean Boase-Beier, Alexandra Büchler, and Fiona Sampson; Ten Russian Poets: Surviving the Twentieth Century, edited by Richard McKane; Osip Mandelstam: The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks, translated by Richard and Elizabeth McKane; Marin Sorescu: Censored Poems, translated by John Hartley Williams and Hilde Ottschofski; Marin Sorescu: The Bridge, translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Lidia Vianu; Sorescu's Choice: Young Romanian Poets, edited by John Fairleigh; Scar on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia, edited by Chris Agee. Translation and Literature, 14(1), 122-128.
- Apollinaire, translated by Robert Chandler; Victor Hugo: How to be a Grandfather, translated by Timothy Adès; Aleksandr Blok: Selected Poems, translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France; Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language, by Steven G. Yao; Faulkner: Une expérience de retraduction, directed by Annick Chapdelaine and Gillian Lane-Mercier. Translation and Literature, 13(1), 114-123.
Designs
Website content
- http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/
Scholarly editions
Other
- Research group
-
I welcome research students working in any area of modernism, those interested in war studies, particularly the Cold War in literature, and would be happy to supervise projects on Joyce, Beckett, Proust, French-English comparative work, research into 20th century and contemporary poetry, and am willing to work with creative writing students.
- Teaching activities
-
I teach on the Modern and Contemporary Literature core modules, approved modules on Cold War Fiction and Film, and Irish Fiction, and help convene the Creative Writing MA programme.