Overview
- Explores the campus novel genre as a whole
- Shows how the academic novel balances utopian and regressive tendencies, reflecting crises in higher education today
- Engages with scholarship across campus literature, education studies and American studies
Part of the book series: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century (ALTC)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Campus Fictions argues that the academic novel balances utopian and regressive tendencies, reinforcing the crises we face in higher learning while simultaneously signposting hope for a worn institution. Whether a bestseller such as Erich Segal ’s romance Love Story (1970) or wonkier fare such as Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), the academic novel mystifies the academy not only to a wide public but also—worse—to readers who might describe themselves as sympathetic to higher learning. The book takes an eclectic approach to the academic novel with chapters discussing, for example, the genre’s rampant anti-intellectualism and its work refusals, studying novels such as Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring (1993) and Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members (2014). The book is also accompanied by the “Directory of the American Campus Novel ” file, which tracks the genre by year, by setting, and by other datapoints that readers might make use of. Responding directly to Jeffrey Williams, the renowned scholar of critical university studies who implores faculty to “teach the university,” the book ’s conclusion describes strategies for putting these novels into circulation in the classroom. Through this breadth, Campus Fictions establishes the importance of maintaining hope in the field of critical university studies, which tends toward apocalypticism and perhaps therefore toward disengagement.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Wesley Beal serves as W.C. Brown, Jr. Professor of English at Lyon College in the United States. He published his first monograph, Networks of Modernism, in 2015.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Campus Fictions
Book Subtitle: Exemption and the American Campus Novel
Authors: Wesley Beal
Series Title: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49911-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-49910-4Published: 01 February 2024
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-49913-5Due: 03 March 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-49911-1Published: 31 January 2024
Series ISSN: 2634-579X
Series E-ISSN: 2634-5803
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 228
Number of Illustrations: 10 b/w illustrations
Topics: North American Literature, Fiction, Contemporary Literature, Higher Education