Politics in the Ivory Towers: The American Academic Novel 1950-1980

Higher education has always been recognized as the driving force for the cultural, social and economic development of a nation, and the authors of academic novels are challengers of the ideologies, the power relations, and mediations present in the academy and its discourses. This study offers the hypothesis that the American academic novels of the 1950s through the 1980s are literary artifacts of their time and are a part of the interplay of discourses in higher education which they both shape and are shaped by. (…) The study focuses on literary works belonging to the genre of American academic fiction published over a thirty-year period (from 1950 through 1980). The main text of this study includes a detailed analysis of the academic novels with an emphasis on particular issues that are resonant in the spheres of the American academic world and their reflection in American culture, education and politics. The subject of investigation is the politics of higher education and American academic fiction as represented in Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952), Randal Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution (1954), May Sarton’s A Small Room (1961), John Williams’s Stoner (1965), Gail Godwin’s The Odd Woman (1974) and Alison Lurie’s The War Between the Tates (1974). After a study of the academic novels from the 1950’s to the 1980’s, the focus shifts to the continuation of the genre through to the turn of the century. (Iz autoričinog Predgovora.)

Godina izdanja: 2023.
ISBN tiskanog izdanja: ISBN 978-953-314-199-2
ISBN pdf izdanja: ISBN 978-953-314-337-8