CHAPTER I

THEMATIC FRAMEWORK
The English word campus is derivated from the Latin word campus which
means field. It was applied to the physical space occupied by a college or university.
The usage of campus to refer to the space in college or university is an American
coinage. The word entered the Oxford Dictionary of English in 1958 and it refered to the
University of East Anglia which was one of the new universities built on the American
model. In this context, Kingsley Amiss Lucky Jim is regarded as the first modern campus
novel though it was published much before the coinage of the word campus.
Campus novel is defined in The Oxford Companion of English Literature as A
novel set on a university or polytechnic campus; usually written by novelists who are also
(temporarily or permanently) academics.1 Chris Baldick gives this definition for campus
novel- Campus novel is a novel, usually comic or satirical, in which the action is set
within enclosed world of university (or similar set of learning) and highlights the follies
of academic life.2 It is said that the campus novel or academic novel is a small but a
recognizable sub-genre of contemporary fiction. It has developed differently depending
on the cultural background of the corresponding country. The genre of Campus Novel is
called variedly. It is called University Novel in England. The British Campus Novel is
Teacher-centric. In the British University Novel, the students are placed in the object
position and are viewed from the perspectives of the teachers. In America the genre is
called Campus Novel or College Novel. It is not teacher-centric. It dwells upon various
issues related to the campus life.

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The genre is also called the murder comics with the advent of Robertson Daviess
The Rebel Angels published in 1982. There is also a German variety known as
Professornorman. It was a minor genre which enjoyed a short flourishing during the
second half of the nineteenth century. This variety is based on the profession of the
author rather than the subject matter and the setting of the novels. Martin Walsers
Brandung translated as Breakers is an example of this category. However there is no
indigenous campus novel in German-speaking countries in contrast to Great Britain, the
United States and Canada. It is because of the absence of campus in the German
university system until recently.Though it is proclaimed that Campus Novel is dead, there
are evidences for the flourishing of campus novels in many countries so that it is said that
Campus Novel is in vigorous health.
Campus Novel is one which is set on academic ground. It deals with professional
academics. The tone of campus novel is in general exuberantly witty but intelligent. It
focuses not only on the teachers of English literature but also includes a number of
allusions to English literature classics. It deals playfully with concepts related to the
literary composition. Campus novel presents a variety of literary genres and approaches
successively. It depicts higher education systems. Indeed the best campus novels
experiment and play with the genre of fiction itself, comment on contemporary issues,
ridicule professional steriotypes and educational trends and highlight the pain of
intellectuals called upon to assess themselves against each other and against their
internalized expectations of brilliance.
In general Campus Novel is described as one which narrates a story that is
situated in or around a university, whereas the main characters are professors or students.

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However the plots of campus novels may be totally different and have various functions.
Sometimes the plot of campus novel is woven around the criticism of the real world
outside the university walls as the case in the novel called Dog. It may also deal with the
struggle between the values of the academy and values of industry and business and its
usefulness for the society in general as the case in Nice. Or the plot may dwell upon the
description of sexual harassment as the case in Der Campus.
It is observed that the English university novels had appeared in the nineteenth
century. Yet they had failed to offer a problem common to better known Victorian
fiction. They were preoccupied with the peculiarities of life with two exclusive and
inbred communities in Oxford and Cambridge universities. These novels constituted a
narrowly specialized body of literature built around codes of behaviour and thought
which at times appeared artificial to the outside world. The Campus Novel of the
nineteenth century evinced that the genre was only concerned with university life at the
two most important universities of that time. However it had undergone several changes
resulting educational reform movement, the admission of women to universities.
American Campus Novel had its origin in the 19th century as well and had dealt
with the same topics like professors, students, and their daily life at the academy. The
transformation genre to campus novel occurred because the 19th century was an era of
intense social change and industrial growth that destabilized the prodigious cultural
influences of privileged institutions of higher education. The first American novel about
university, on the other hand, is Nathenial Hawthornes Fanshawe which was published
in 1828. The first African campus novel by Nicholas Mnlongo was not published until
2004.

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The factor that led to the birth of Campus Novel was indeed sociological. After
the World War II, there was a great expansion in University education. One could witness
that many universities were built and the old one were expanded. It obviously paved the
way for the job opportunities in arts faculties. Consequently it attracted aspiring and
practising writers, especially in America, where the syllabus had already contained
creative writing. The service of professional writers was hired for teaching creative
writing and conventional literature course.
The profession of teaching in the colleges and universities became preferable on
many accounts. Firstly, the conditions of profession for the writers were agreeable.
Secondly, there was flexibility in the teaching hours. Thirdly, there were long vacations
with salary. It helped them continue writing books along with teaching. Thus it became
the favoured second occupation for writers. The most significant factor for the rise of the
campus novels was is the very nature of novel writing. It is only obvious that the
novelists tend to get their ideas from the atmosphere they used to inhibit and thus the
writers who were surrounded by the college and university campuses started writing
novels dealing the campus. However, most of the early campus novels were written by
the teachers in the Arts or Humanities because it was in those departments the novelists
worked.
The next factor for the emergence of Campus Novel was a general one. It is based
on the fact that the novelist must first create or imagine a world which has some kind of
logical relation to the real world. The university or college presents the writer with such a
world, with its own distinct customs, seasons, rituals and foibles. There are also things

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like power, ambition, rivalry, lust, anxiety available for the writer from the campus. Thus
the universities appeal to novelists as settings for fiction.
It is also felt that the university as an institution and a setting for a novel has the
power to criticise society. It is so because it is regarded as higher and reliable source of
knowledge. As a result, the sub-genre of campus novel was encouraged. However the
campus novel criticised not only humankind, but also authors, ideas, books, trains of
thoughts.
The Campus Novel originally is almost exclusively Anglo-American. Though
there were campus novels in the European countries, they were indigenous. They had not
made any significant literary impact. It is so because they did not have any designed
campuses and the universities were territorially defined and self-contained. Besides, the
European academics were more concerned about preserving their professional dignity
that the academics in Britain and America. The teachers were drawn from the local
districts and the pupils were mostly days- scholars, whereas the universities in England
and America were residential with campuses. They were very different in their
environment and more readily productive which was essentially the raw material of
fiction. It is very interesting to note that the Europeans were fascinated by the AngloAmerican campus novel. It was so because the Anglo-American campus novel seemed to
be so transgressive in mocking and exposing the follies and misdemeanours of the
academic profession especially when the writer is a member of the teaching profession. It
reminds Graham Greenes suggestion of cultivation of disloyalty to write novels.
This Campus Novel is variously known as varsity novel and academic novel. It is
observed that the genre of campus novel emerged in America with The Groves of
Academe by Mary McCarthy. This novel was published in 1952. However, the rise of

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campus novel was witnessed in England more or less simultaneously. Kingsley Amiss
Lucky Jim is regarded as the first British campus novel. It was published in 1954.
Campus Novel has grown considerably in its scope and range with the passage of time.
Some important Western campus novels have been briefly discussed below.
The Groves of Academe (1951) by Mary McCarthy concerns the sequence of events
that take place after Henry Mulcahy, a literary instructor at the fictive Jocelyn
College, learns that his teaching appointment will not be renewed. The novel is
intended as a satire of academics based on the author's teaching experiences at Bard
and Sarah Lawrence Colleges. The novel is McCarthys satiric foray against the
administrations and the faculties of liberal higher education.
The Masters (1951), a compelling account of the struggle to elect a new
Master of a Cambridge college, is probably C. P. Snows best-known and most
critically esteemed novel. It was the fourth book to be published in his Strangers
and Brothers series and is the second of a Cambridge trilogy which starts with
The Light and the Dark (1947) and ends with The Affair (1960).
The novel Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis is also one of the significant campus
novels. The story concerns Jim Dixon who is a junior lecturer of medieval history at
a provincial university and who struggles to keep his job. The paradox is that Jim
hates his job, in fact. There is nothing of interest in the subject for Jim; he is keener
on drinking beer and picking up pretty girls at the university. The object of Jims
hatred and ridicule is the head of the department, Professor Welch. As this is the
person who decides whether or not Jim will be unemployed the next year, Jim tries to
make a good impression on him, although he hates the Professor. He is unwillingly
pushed into pretentious behaviour in relationships with the Welches and his neurotic
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colleague Margaret. Jim is involved in many embarrassing events during the year and
is sacked because of his scandalous public lecture. As the title suggests, Jim is lucky
and happy in the end, when he gets a well-paid job in London and the girl he is in
love with Christine.
Changing Places (1975) was British novelist David Lodge's first book in a
trilogy of campus novels. It is a comic novel with serious undercurrents and its
subtitle is "A Tale of Two Campuses". It tells the story of the six -month academic
exchange between two academics namely Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp from
fictional universities located in Rummidge and Plotinus.
The English participant, Philip Swallow, is a very conventional and
conformist British academic, and somewhat in awe of the American way of life. By
contrast the American, Morris Zapp, is a top-ranking American professor who only
agrees to go to Rummidge because of his matrimonial troubles. Swallow is opposed
to Zapp in every way. The contrast between the American and Brityish systems of
higher education and the cultural shock faced by Zapp and Swallow bring in comedy.
The forty year old academics successfully complete their tenure of six months. The
novel ends without a clear-cut decision, though the sequel Small World: An
Academic Romance, reveals that Swallow and Zapp returned to their respective
countries and domestic situations.
Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) is a humorous "campus novel"
and is a sequel to Changing Places. It describes events ten years after Zapp and
Swallows exchange of jobs and wives. The novel is entirely devoted to satirizing the
culture of attending seminars where scholars can take a paid holiday from work to

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travel all over the world. The book begins in April 1979 at a small academic
conference at the University of Rummidge. It is the first conference that Persse
McGarrigle, an innocent young Irishman who recently completed his master's thesis
on T. S. Eliot, has attended. He teaches at the College named Limerick, after having
been mistakenly interviewed because the administration sent the interview invitation
to him instead of someone else with the same last name. He is bewitched by the
beauty of Angelica Pabst and much of the rest of the book is his quest to find and
win her.
People are seen to move around from conference to conference around the
world. Persse continues to chase Angelica during conferences in Hawaii, Tokyo, and
Hong Kong, and Jerusalem, but he never catches up with her. Finally he meets
Angelica in New York at the Modern Language Association conference at the end of
1979. But Angelica introduces Persse to her fianc, Peter McGarrigle, the person
whose job Persse was interviewed for back in Ireland. However, Peter is not angry,
because as a result, he went to America and there met Angelica.
Nice Work (1988) is the third novel in the sequence. It won the Sunday
Express Book of the Year award in 1988 and was also shortlisted for the Booker
prize. The book describes encounters between Robyn Penrose, a feminist university
teacher specialising in the industrial novel and women's writing, and Vic Wilcox, the
manager of an engineering firm.
Victor Wilcox, a Managing Director of an engineering company in
Rummidge, is the representative of the pragmatic industrial world. It is the Industry
year 1986 and the government introduces the Shadow Scheme aiming at bringing

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universities closer to industry. Therefore Robyn Penrose, an ambitious temporary

lecturer in Womens Studies, is appointed the shadow and is supposed to follow
Victor at his work to learn more about the manufacturing processes. The clash and
misunderstandings between the two characters are inevitable as their values are poles
apart, but eventually they come to know each other better. Victor falls in love with
Robyn and wants to leave his family. But they realize the Shadow Scheme enriched
both of them and stay friends. And Victor reunites with his wife Marjorie.
Meanwhile Robyn inherits a huge sum of money and accepts the offer of prolonged
lectureship at the Rummidge University. Finally When Victor is fired from his job,
he decides to launch a new business being backed by Robyns capital.
The foremost issue the Campus Novel engages the interplay between fiction
and fact. It is so because it is assumed that university novels are realistic because
they are based on the actual institutions and on a real university in a real place. This
is the most important factor for the popularity of campus or academic novels. Yet the
characters tend to be imaginary in general. However the professors and students
identify with certain characters and find similarities between their own lives and the
lives of the fictional characters. Therefore there is interplay between fiction and fact.
At the beginning, campus novel was characterized by comic tradition. There
used to be a robust farce in the campus novel. The setting was pastoral. The element
of entertaining artifice was n the plots of the early campus novel. It is said that the
campus novel presents a civilized entertainment rather than catharsis to the readers.
The problem of security of job of teachers in the colleges and universities was the
recurrent motif in the early campus novels. Since the appointment of teachers in the

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colleges and universities was usually temporary and tenured, the career of these
teachers had always been insecure. In order to retain their jobs, the teachers used to
indulge in various plots and strategies. One of them is entertaining the higher
authorities by giving them parities. Thus parties are a staple feature of campus novels
because they conveniently bring the characters together in large groups, and loosen
their tongues and reduce their inhibitions with alcohol, provoking amusing,
indecorous or impolite revelations.
The next feature which was found in the early campus novel was class. It is
said that it was the universities where the phenomenon of meritocracy which was
responsible for the transformation in English society was traceable. The conflict
between the socially inferior and superior was the plot of the early campus novels. It
is argued that the portrayal such conflicts by the authors associated with university
was more authentic than in the other genres of novel. The heroic period of students
politics has attracted many writers to write novels dealing with the campus.
However, the American campus novels were free from the class related conflicts. It
is so because American universities were so highly differentiated, so recognisably
playable that the novels could chooses a large variety of varsity theme without
having to deal with class automatically.
At the advent of admission of women to the universities and colleges, there
was an evolution of new plots in the campus novels. It is manifested in the
incorporation of gender and sexuality as topics in the academic novels. The plots
showed the liberation from a prudish society on one hand and described the unfair

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inequality of women to men depending upon when the novel was written. There is an
inclusion of class and race conflicts in the plots of campus novels.
The rise of literary theory was another important characteristic of campus
novels. The plots of campus novel had included the discourse on the literary theory
which is manifested in the debate on reality of self and feminist literary criticism.
There was also an attempt to use the campus novel as a means of satirizing the
courses in Creative Writing. Michael Chabons Wonder Boys is an example for this
trend. The state of campus novel during this time was considered to be that of fossil.
It is observed that the campus novel could also be very serious. The writers of
campus novels used to address issues directly or indirectly with a certain intention
which may be to provoke and force the reader to think about what is going on in the
real world and call attention to certain problems.
Subsequently changes were noticed in the campus novel as the universities
changed. The changes were found in the tone which is angry, coruscating, debunking
or melancholy. Michael Frayns The Trick of It published in 1989 is an example of
this trend. There was a tendency to view that the world has begun to vanish so that
the campus novels behaved like the elegies to an idea of the campus. The element of
satire which was dominant factor in the campus novels at the beginning is also
prevalent in the later campus novels. Coming From Behind is an illustration of this as
the campus it depicts is not a campus at all.
The Campus Novel also meant to be a very adaptable register of changes in
culture reflecting the sexual more in the contemporary period. It is observed in
Rebecca Goldsteins The Mind-Body Problem which is an outstanding feminist

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campus novel exposing the male chauvinism of academic institutions. Francine

Proses Blue Angel is another campus novel which is about the seduction and
destruction of professors by unscrupulous coeducation in the era of Political
Correctness and ideological change.
Another change in the tendency in the later campus novel is to regard
campuses as being bleak. There was an ambiguous feature at this time. While the
people looked at the genre of campus novel with sneer on one hand, they had also
taken a good deal of interest in reading the campus novels on the other. The rise of
campus novel was noticed in many countries. Michael Wildings Academia Nuts in
2002 is an Australian campus novel; Jeffrey Moores Red Rose Chain in 2000 is a
Canadian campus novel; JM Coetzees Disgrace in 1999 is a South African campus
novel.
The basic requirement for writing a campus novel is that the author should be
a university teacher. It is also observed that the authors of campus novels were
chiefly the faculty of the Department of English. Yet the campus novels dealing with
science also appeared. Jonathan Lethems She Climbed Across the Table and Richard
Powerss Galatea 2.2belong to this category While the former deals with a physicist,
the latter with neurologist. In America the genre of campus novel had grown in
stature, important and relevant. This is resultant of increasing ubiquity of the
university education during the post-war period. Some of the well known campus
novels are Mary McCarthys The Groves of Academe, Randall Jarrells Picture,
Vladimir Nabokovs Pnin and Pale Fire, Malcom Bradburys The Hitory of Man,
Amanda Corsss Death in Tenured Position and David Lodges Small World.

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It is very important to note that India had one of the world famous universities
called Nalanda University before the invation of the English. This university was
established for the Buddhist studies in 427 but was the centre almost all subjects.
During the British rule, universities were created in three major cities in India
namely University of Madras in Madras, University of Bombay in Bombay and
University of Calcutta in Calcuttan in 1857. Subsequently many more colleges and
universities were also established for the higher education in India. According the
statstics, there are 563 universities and numerous colleges in India at present.
With such a huge number of universities and colleges, it is quite obvious that
they have drawn the attention of creative writers. As a result, the subgenre called
campus novel appeared in Indian Literature about which M.K.Naik and Shymala
Narayan state that the campus novel is not a favoured form with Indian novelists 3.
Yet they have identified many campus novels. Thus the study the campus novels in
Indian English Literature is felt to be very significant. As a result, thirteen campus
novels are selected for the study of the theme amd form in this dissertation. They are
divided into two sections namely Campus Novels of College and campus Novels of
Universities. The former is undertaken for the study in the following chapter .

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Notes
1

Dinah Birch, Ed The Oxford Companion to English Literature (London: OUP,

2009)

189.

Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, (London:

Oxford UP, 1990) 30
3

M.K.Naik and Shyamala A. Narayan, Indian English Literature 1980-2000 A

Critical Survey (Delhi: Pencraft International, 2001) 96.

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