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. Academic novels typically center on professors or students. Part of mainstream American fiction for decades, the genre in its current form dates back to the early 1950s.

History

The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy, published in 1952, is often quoted as the earliest example, though literary critic Elaine Showalter points to C. P. Snow's The Masters from 1951. Several older novels have settings and characteristics similar to academic novels, such as Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Régis Messac's Smith Conundrum, and Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night.
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.
Academic novels are usually told from the viewpoint of a faculty member or the viewpoint of a student. 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, Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen mysteries, Carolyn Gold Heilbrun's Kate Fansler mysteries and Colin Dexter's The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn.
The university setting may be a real institution or a fictional university.

Themes

Campus novels exploit the fictional possibilities created by a closed environment of the university, with idiosyncratic characters inhabiting unambiguous hierarchies. They may describe the reaction of a fixed socio-cultural perspective to new social attitudes.

Examples