Academic Novel, Campus Novel or  University Novel

A novel set primarily in a college or university community in which the main characters are academics, often employed by the English department. Like detective stories or murder mysteries, many of which are set in British country houses, academic novels frequently exploit the fictional possibilities created by a closed environment in which a number of highly distinct, often idiosyncratic personalities are thrown together. In the case of the murder mystery, the insularity of the setting can produce a sense of heightened tension, but in the academic novel, the sequestered character of the campus often results in an atmosphere of comic inconsequentiality. Most academic novels are humorous, and many explore the implications of the variously attributed maxim that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low. Even so, academic novels have on occasion addressed more serious themes, including power, sex, class, and banishment and exile.

Literary Study Notes

The satirical portrayal of dreamily impractical thinkers is as old as Aristophanes’ the Clouds, which depicts Socrates riding through the heavens in a basket. And novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874), Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925), and Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935) dealt with academic settings or characters. But the modern academic novel is generally thought to date from the mid-twentieth century, with the beginning marked by the appearance, in Great Britain, of C. P. Snow’s The Masters (1951) and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), and, in the United States, of Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1951).


    Among the most widely known British academic novels are Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man (1975), and the trilogy by David Lodge: Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984), and Nice Work (1988). Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) is considered a varsity novel, a predominantly British genre, generally set at Oxford or Cambridge, in which the primary characters are undergraduates rather than faculty.

Noteworthy American instances of the academic novel are Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957) and Pale Fire (1962); John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy (1966), in which, through an elaborate allegory, the Universe is refigured as a University; Alison Lurie, The War Between the Tates (1974); Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985); Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys (1995); Richard Russo, Straight Man (1997); and Philip Roth, The Human Stain (2000).

Over the years, the academic novel has registered not only the currents of the larger culture but also the changing nature of academic life. If any of the earlier instances of the genre depicted the college or university community as a pseudo-pastoral enclosure with its own quaint rules and conventions, more recent novels have treated the same setting as a microcosm, a more tightly focused or intensified version of the larger world, in which ideas and values circulating through the broader culture emerge in high relief. The tone of the academic novel in the first years of the twenty-first century darkened as the working conditions of many teaching faculty deteriorated and the educational mission of the university was superseded by the economic priorities of increasingly corporatized institutions. For the adjunct novel, in which the primary characters are marginalized, underpaid, and untenured faculty whose positions expose them to uncertainty, deprivation, and anxiety rather than protecting them from it, see Jeffrey J. Williams, “Unlucky Jim: The Rise of the Adjunct Novel,” The Chronicle Review, 16 November 2012.