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

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Published 16 May 2005

Citation: Knight, Emeritus, Charles. "Satire and the Academic Novel". The Literary Encyclopedia. 16 May 2005.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1549, accessed 21 November 2009.]