Genres
Campus novel
A novel, also called an academic novel, whose main action is set in and around the campus of a university.
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. The closed academic world supplies the machinery: hierarchies, eccentric characters, and fixed faculty attitudes meeting a changing student body. Many are comic or satirical, counterpointing intellectual pretensions and human weaknesses, while others treat university life seriously. The modern genre dates to the early 1950s, with Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe (1952) often cited as the earliest example. Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), David Lodge's campus novels, Nabokov's Pnin and John Williams's Stoner line the shelf, and novels centered on students are sometimes termed varsity novels.
For novelists the campus is a ready-made pressure vessel: a closed community with its own rituals, rankings and politics, which is why the genre reads as the novel of manners with tenure. Its modern descendant is dark academia, which keeps the cloistered university and swaps the satire for gothic mood; Donna Tartt's The Secret History appears on both shelves.