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: Gina Lyle (University of York), Graham MacPhee (University of Manchester), Kerry Myler (Birmingham 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

Resources

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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 the novel and satire to overlap. But a novel feels like satire when the reader senses that irony,…

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2519 words

Citation: Knight, Charles. "Satire and the Academic Novel". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 May 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1549, accessed 22 November 2024.]