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 and the same characteristics, such as Willa Cather's The Professor's House of 1925 and Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night of 1935 (see below).

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.

Themes

Campus novels exploit the closed world of the university setting, with 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)
• Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson (1956)
• 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)
• Small World by David Lodge (1984)
• White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985)
• Redback by Howard Jacobson (1986)
• Nice Work by David Lodge (1988)
• Possession: A Romance 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)
• Starter for Ten by David Nicholls (2003)
• Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z., by Debra Weinstein (2004)
• I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe (2004)
• Final Exam by P.F. Kluge (2005)
• On Beauty by Zadie Smith (2005)
• The Catastrophist, by Lawrence Douglas (2006)
• The Secret Life of E. Robert Pendleton, by Michael Collins (2006)
• WALDEN, by Michael T. Dolan (2006)
• Gone Tomorrow by P.F. Kluge (2008)
• Indignation by Philip Roth (2008)
• Sorbonne Confidential by Laurel Zuckerman (2009)
• Crump by P.J.Vanston (2010)

References

• Kenneth Womack: Academic Satire: The Campus Novel in Context in A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000 (Blackwell Publishing 2005, ISBN 1405113758)
• Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. Merriam-Webster 1995, ISBN 0877790426 (eingeschränkte Online-Version (Google Books))
• 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 0-19-928332-X)
• Carter, Ian. Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the Post-War Years (Routledge, Chapman & Hall; 1990; ISBN 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)