[2] He has spoken out against academic schools of thought such as New Criticism, post structuralism and semiotics which ignore or downplay scholarly analysis of authorial intention.
[4][5] Now his ongoing genealogical research in relation to American history has led to a new book guided by Alma MacDougall to publication on March 12, 2024 - An Okie's Racial Reckonings.
In the spirit of Jim Webb's Born Fighting but richly researched and detailed, it traces the involvement of Parker's newly identified ancestors in momentous episodes of American history.
[6][7][8] On September 22, 2008 at the inaugural public program of the CUNY Leon Levy Center for Biography, "An Eloquent Beginning", one of the presenters, Pulitzer Prize winner John Matteson, read aloud the first paragraph of Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819-1851, as an example of how “the opening paragraph should reflect the character of the subject, the way the music of a great aria fits the mood of the words being sung".
Parker has in preparation a three-volume selection to be published by the Gordian Press with Robert A. Sandberg collaborating as design and layout editor.
In addition, Parker has written articles and books in collaboration with other scholars, most frequently with Brian Higgins, as in their Louisiana State University Press publication Reading Melville’s “Pierre; or, The Ambiguities” (2006).
[13] In the 1970s Parker pioneered the study of lost authority in standard American novels by Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer and others.