CAMPUS NOVEL

A 'campus novel', also known as an 'academic novel', is a novel whose main action is set in and around the campus of a university. The genre in its current form dates back to the early 1950s. ''The Groves of Academe'' by Mary McCarthy, published in 1952, is often quoted as the earliest example, although in ''Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents'', Elaine Showalter discusses C.P. Snow's ''The Masters'', of the previous year, and several earlier novels have an academic setting.
Many well-known campus novels, such as Kingsley Amis's ''Lucky Jim'' and those of David Lodge, are comic or satirical, often counterpointing intellectual pretensions and human weaknesses. Some, however, attempt a serious treatment of university life; examples include C.P. Snow's ''The Masters'', J.M. Coetzee's ''Disgrace'' and Philip Roth's ''The Human Stain''. Novels such as Evelyn Waugh's ''Brideshead Revisited'' that focus on students rather than faculty are often considered to belong to a distinct genre, sometimes termed varsity novels.
A subgenre is the 'campus murder mystery', where the closed university setting substitutes for the country house of Golden Age detective novels; examples include Dorothy L. Sayers' ''Gaudy Night'', Carolyn Gold Heilbrun's ''Kate Fansler'' mysteries and Colin Dexter's ''The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn''.

Contents

Themes

Significant examples

Criticism

See also

External links

Themes

Campus novels exploit the closed world of the university setting, with stock characters inhabiting unambiguous hierarchies. They may describe the reaction of a fixed socio-cultural perspective (the academic staff) to new social attitudes (the new student intake).

Significant examples

★ ''The Masters'' by C.P. Snow (1951)

★ ''The Groves of Academe'' by Mary McCarthy (1952)

★ ''Lucky Jim'' by Kingsley Amis (1954)

★ ''Pictures from an Institution'' by Randall Jarrell (1954)

★ ''Pnin'' by Vladimir Nabokov (1957)

★ '' Eating People is Wrong '' by Malcolm Bradbury (1959)

★ ''A New Life'' by Bernard Malamud (1961)

★ ''Giles Goat-Boy, Or, The Revised New Syllabus'' by John Barth (1966)

★ ''Porterhouse Blue'' by Tom Sharpe (1974)

★ ''Changing Places'' by David Lodge (1975)

★ ''The History Man'' by Malcolm Bradbury (1975)

★ ''The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn'' (The Morse Series) by Colin Dexter (1977)

★ ''The Big U'' by Neal Stephenson (1984)

★ '' by David Lodge (1984)

★ ''White Noise'' by Don Delillo (1985)

★ ''Redback'' by Howard Jacobson (1986)

★ ''Nice Work'' by David Lodge (1988)

★ '' by A. S. Byatt (1990)

★ '' The Crown of Columbus '' by Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris (1991)

★ ''The Secret History'' by Donna Tartt (1992)

★ '' Japanese by Spring '' by Ishmael Reed (1993)

★ ''Galatea 2.2'' by Richard Powers (1995)

★ ''Moo'' by Jane Smiley (1995)

★ ''Death is Now My Neighbour'' (The Morse Series) by Colin Dexter (1996)

★ ''Straight Man'' by Richard Russo (1997)

★ ''Disgrace'' by J.M. Coetzee (1999)

★ ''The Human Stain'' by Philip Roth (2000)

★ ''Thinks ...'' by David Lodge (2001)

★ ''I Am Charlotte Simmons'' by Tom Wolfe (2004)

★ ''On Beauty'' by Zadie Smith (2005)

Criticism

★ McGurl, Mark. "The Program Era: Pluralisms in Postwar American Fiction." '' Critical Inquiry'' 32.1 (Autumn 2005): 102-109.

★ Showalter, Elaine. ''Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents '' (OUP; 2005; ISBN-10: 0-19-928332-X)

★ Carter, Ian. ''Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the Post-War Years'' (Routledge, Chapman & Hall; 1990; ISBN-10: 0415048427)

See also

★ School and university in literature

★ Sexual harassment in education

External links

★ Edemariam A. 'Who's afraid of the campus novel?' ''Guardian'', 2 Oct 2004

★ Lodge D. 'Exiles in a small world' ''Guardian'', 8 May 2004

★ Showalter E. 'What I read and what I read for' & 'The Fifties: Ivory towers' (from ''Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents'')