Dec 24, 2009

Foreign Affairs | Historical Context

The History of the Academic Novel

Foreign Affairs is a variant of the genre known as the academic novel, which satirizes life on the college campus. One of the earliest and most amusing of all academic novels is Lucky Jim (1954) by British writer Kingsley Amis, in which Jim Dixon, a young working-class lecturer in history, attains a position at a provincial university where he has to deal not only with his own dislike of the job but also with the upper-class fool who heads the department. In addition to being extremely witty, Amis also makes insightful points about...