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.
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
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
External links
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