Faculty towers

Elaine Showalter, a literary scholar whose career has been both distinguished and controversial, writes here about her own experience of academic life as it appears in fiction. Her subject is the novel of the campus, and how such books have reflected the shifting position of universities and the wider culture since 1950.

Showalter examines a range of examples. She looks at C.P. Snow's portrait of Cambridge fellows, David Lodge's jet-setting professor Morris Zapp, and Amanda Cross's best-selling mystery series featuring the detective Kate Fansler. She also considers a more recent wave of harsh campus novels, where stories of sexual harassment often work as allegories about power, rage and longing.

The book is written as a personal reckoning as much as a survey, with Showalter placing her own years in the profession alongside the books she discusses. It will appeal to readers interested in campus fiction, the history of higher education, and the connections between literature and academic life.