Satire and the Academic Novel

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Charles Knight (University of Massachusetts, Boston)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kerry Myler (Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Domains

Literature Topic

Dates

Date of occurrence 1950

Places

United Kingdom (Location)
United States (Location)

Genres and Modes

Novel
Satire

The satiric campus novel, in its contemporary form, begins with a cluster of novels written in the 1950s: Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) and Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People is Wrong (1959) in Britain; Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1953) and Randell Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution (1954) in the United States. But education has been a subject of satire since Aristophanes mocked Socrates in Clouds (423 BC) and Lucian attacked philosophers and rhetoricians in the second century. Novels of education constitute a recognized category including hundreds of examples. The problem of making distinctions that identify the satiric campus novel is intensified by the tendency of …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2519 words

Citation: Knight, Charles. "Satire and the Academic Novel". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 May 2005 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1549, accessed 24 November 2024.]

Save this article