A campus novel, also called an academic novel, is a story where the main events happen on a university campus and nearby areas. These novels usually focus on professors or students. Novels that mainly follow students are sometimes called varsity novels. For many years, this type of story has been part of American fiction. The current form of this genre started in the early 1950s.
History
The book The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy, published in 1952, is sometimes considered the first example of academic novels. However, literary critic Elaine Showalter notes that C. P. Snow’s The Masters, published in 1951, may be earlier. Some older books, such as Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925), Régis Messac’s Smith Conundrum (first published between 1928 and 1931), and Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935), also have settings and themes similar to academic novels.
Many famous campus novels, such as Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis and works by David Lodge, use humor or satire to show the funny or silly side of smart people and their mistakes. Some books, however, take a more serious look at life in universities. Examples include The Masters by C. P. Snow, Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee, and The Human Stain by Philip Roth.
Academic novels are usually written from the perspective of a teacher (like in Straight Man by Richard Russo) or a student (like in I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe). Books such as Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, which focus more on students than teachers, are often seen as a different type of story, sometimes called varsity novels.
A type of academic novel is the campus murder mystery, where the closed environment of a university is similar to the setting of old detective stories involving country houses. Examples include Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, the Gervase Fen mysteries by Edmund Crispin, the Kate Fansler mysteries by Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, and The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn by Colin Dexter.
The university setting in these books can be a real college or a made-up university.
Themes
Campus novels use the unique setting of a university to create stories. These stories often include characters with distinct roles and clear social structures. They may show how established groups, such as teachers, respond to new ideas or people, like students who bring different perspectives.