Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, both professors of
Literature, novelists and literary critics, have chosen the campus
novel as a medium to explore the possibilities of coexistence of
realism and fictiveness. Their first hand knowledge of the social
milieu together with a fine ear for the absurdities and pretensions of
the critical modes they analyse provide a sweeping satire of the
intellectual and social atmosphere created by anxious university
teachers in desperate need to keep up or eager for promotion. The
most relevant feature of their fiction is the attempt to incorporate
elements taken to be an ultimate challenge to realism and showing
them in a symbiotic relationship. Literariness, parody, pastiche,
genre self-questioning, and what has come to be known as
fictionality are some of the most obvious devices at play in the task
of making the novel a mode of formal and imaginative experiment
while laughing at the excesses under way.
