Charles Knight - Satire and the Academic Novel

Charles Knight, Satire and the Academic Novel. Literary Encyclopedia

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.