Wilfried Steiner’s Der Weg nach Xanadu – an Austrian Campus Novel?

This article focuses on Wilfried Steiner’s 2003 novel Der Weg nach Xanadu / The Way To Xanadu which appears to be an Austrian campus novel owing to the setting of the Austrian world of academia in its first part. Owing to its lack of local coloring, however, the Vienna-based plot of the first part does not feature a (stereo)typically ‘Austrian’ genius loci. Although this part of the text echoes features of the international campus novel tradition, it may be definitely not considered an Austrian campus novel. The second part of the novel is set in the Lake District, focuses on Coleridge’s Romantic poetry and the Doppelgänger-motif. Whereas the first part may be vaguely contextualized within the international campus novel tradition, the second part is deeply imbued with the Romantic tradition of the Künstlerroman or artist’s novel.

Campus Novels, Camaraderie, and White Nationalist Merriment

Chapter 1 highlights the significance of everyday social practices for white sectional reunion after the Civil War, reassessing the form assumed by reconciliation as it transitioned from an object of political contestation to common sense reality. Specifically, it recovers the campus novel, a popular though largely unstudied genre that, despite its sophomoric content, acquired historical weight by turning the practice of campus affections into a metonym for national belonging tacitly predicated on racial exclusion. Focusing on the ability for merriment to overcome and, above all, trivialize intra-white difference, novels like Hammersmith: His Harvard Days (1879) and For the Blue and Gold (1901) enacted a civic pedagogy, becoming handbooks for a sociality that turned political disagreement into jocular affinity, dispute into banter, and racial exclusion into an implicit element of white fellow feeling.

Crusading Academia with Special Reference to Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone

Studying follies in academics with the reference to Indian Campus novels is a fascinating subject. Yet it is a virgin area. We come across a number of studies on plots, themes and characters in novels but when it comes to academics, we find a few and far between, that to sketchy and random. Largely such a state of affairs in literary studies encouraged me to commence this study to unravel its different facets, shortcomings and fecundities. In a campus novel, academia is an integral and important component. Besides serving the purpose of a backdrop, it is of overriding significance as it determines the characters in most cases. Although, there are early examples of faulty academic system in Indian campus novels but full-fledged follies and remedies are found in Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone.

Class and Gender – The Representation of Women in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim

Lucky Jim is one of the novels that mark the beginning of a small subgenre of contemporary fiction called the campus novel. It was written and published in the 1950s, a period when more women and working-class people started attending universities. This paper analyses the representation of women in terms of their gender and class.