Study on Genre of Contemporary Literary Fiction in Campus Novel

The Campus Novel, often known as Academic Fiction, is an intriguing genre that has a global following. Campuses all around the globe give a wealth of creative raw material for literature. In European nations, the tradition of college novels began over a century ago. David Lodge is one of the most well-known modern authors in this genre in the United Kingdom. Even before him, works like Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin (1955) and Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim (1954) possessed the characteristics of campus fiction. However, David Lodge, a well-known critic, believes Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academy (1952) to be the first great college book. Because of its subject matter and environment, this genre of contemporary literary fiction achieved appeal even before it was classified and labelled. Campus Fiction is defined as a genre of books with a university setting and professors as main protagonists, according to The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English (1996). Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim (1954), set at a midlands redbrick university and featuring the humorous antics of a junior professor, was an early example. Other notable examples include Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People is Wrong (1959), a satirical novel set at a new plate-glass university about the rise of an unscrupulous Professor of History, and The History Man (1975), a satirical novel set at a new plate-glass university about the rise of an unscrupulous Professor of History..

When reading campus novels, readers should receive the impression that there are a lot of similar themes that exist in a lot of them. This section seeks to identify the genre and its distinguishing characteristics. The first one is about The Movement and the phrase "Angry Young Men." The second section of this subchapter examines further aspects of campus novels. Practical examples from Lucky Jim, Changing Places, Nice Work, and On Beauty are offered to reinforce the theoretical arguments. Although Smith's work may not have been initially classed as a campus novel, there is undoubtedly a reason why it is rated as one of the finest college novels by The Guardian. The first works depicting the atmosphere of universities did not exist until the 1950s. "Literary portrayals of academics may be found long back in the Middle Ages," Björg says. Those writings, however, do not qualify as college novels. It wasn't until the second half of the twenty-first century that this new genre of campus novels began to attract the attention of both authors and readers. "Nearly 200 works of campus fiction were produced in Britain alone between 1945 and 1979," according to Björg, "not to mention an American production of well over 400 titles." What is it about this genre that makes it so popular? Why are non-academics drawn to these books? The setting of campus novels is, predictably, universities and their campuses, with all of the people belonging to this environment. It's logical that persons who are portrayed in campus novels read the tales about themselves and, in some Campus books, on the other hand, have been widely accepted and read by individuals who do not live on campus. This leads us to believe that there are additional factors at play in the popularity of campus books. Is it the fact that universities have long been restricted to a small group of society's members? For other readers, it might just be a desire to learn more about other people's lives. For many, colleges may provide an atmosphere rife with secret political battles, love intrigues, and intellectual quarrels. Obviously, each reader has a different motivation for reading college fiction. "Social change contributed in more direct ways to campus fiction's success," according to Stevenson, "through greater acquaintance with university surroundings (...) after the growth in education after the war.".

Campus fiction from both the United Kingdom and the United States has touched on practically every facet of student life. Despite its wealth of literature, India is still in the early stages of development, as many new Indian authors have dabbled in this genre. Modern Indian authors, with their deep interest in inquisitively investigating fresh issues, have begun to prove their strength in this genre as well in the early twenty-first century. These authors delve into a wide range of Indian concerns and ideas, many of which are both current and uniquely Indian. Among the most popular genres in recent years, collegiate fiction, which has a few subgenres of its own, has gotten a lot of attention. According to careful study, Indian novelists have also been keenly aware of the academic context, and we now have a few authors who are blatantly aware of this kind of fiction. R.K. Narayan, Prema Nanda Kumar, Anuradha Marwah Roy, Anita Desai, Rita Joshi, Meena Alexander, Kaveri Bhatt, Ranga Rao, Rani Dharker, Chetan Bhagat, Amitaba Bhagchi, and Srividya Natarajan are some of the Indian English authors who have contributed to the genre. These authors expose the academic system's intrinsic conflicts, wants, ambitions, and hypocrisies. They attempt to depict the perspective and experience of an insider. Some academic novels feature idealistic educators who want for academic independence in order to achieve academic brilliance. They naively believe the university is a centre of intellectual exploration, only to be disillusioned by its anti-intellectual practises. They leave the school dissatisfied and go on in search of a more fulfilling intellectual experience, which they believe will not be found in academia. Despite the fact that the college book is considered an Anglo-American genre, it has a large following in India. In India, it got off to a sluggish start. In India, academic novels trace back to R.K. Narayan's time when he authored The Bachelor of Arts (1937). This work, which initially published in India at a young age, protagonist's college experience is the focus of the novel's first few chapters, before moving on to his love and family life. This is the situation in most Tamil novels, which use a university or college as a location for a few chapters before moving on to a new goal, ignoring the importance of the academy. According to Lyons, books that do not take a serious approach to higher education yet include students or professors as protagonists cannot be classified as campus fiction. He explicitly specifies his criteria for identifying a book, a college novel, in his preface to The College Story in America (1962): "I consider a novel of academic life one in which higher education is dealt with seriousness and the principal characters are students or professors."‖. A review of Indian college novels suggests that they may be classified into many groups. The primary categories are as follows: 1) Novels about students on campus 2) Campus novels focusing on Faculty, 3) Campus novels focusing on Vice Chancellor, 4) Campus novels focusing on all of the campus's malfunctions, 5) Buildungsroman. Novels like 'The Long Long Days' and 'The Truth (Almost) About Bharat' fall under the first type. The campus life of students is shown here as observed by students themselves. The hustle and bustle of hostel life, the close bonds formed by friends, and their noisy mischief are all covered in depth. In these works, the students' attitudes are prominent. Love affairs or attraction between students of opposing sexes is a recurring theme in the majority of these works. Because college students are at a susceptible age for falling in love, love affairs are always described. In P.M. Nityanandan's "The Long Long Days," Gopinath, a Junior Intermediate student at Vikrama College, finds new friends. Typical student activities include ragging, excursions, and the Graduation Day Celebration. The first act is an intercollegiate cricket match. The students' respect and attention for the professors and the administrator, Natarajan, is noteworthy. Unlike the kids in prior books, the pupils in this narrative are unselfish. They are not only polite, but they also regard the prestige of their institution. The Truth (Almost) About Bharat is a story about a medical student named Bharat. Students hurl stones at staff vehicles during a student protest, and one of the stones Bharat throws strikes chawkidar Shaffruddin. He is admitted to the ICU, and Bharat runs, fearing serious repercussions. On his motorcycle, he makes a cross-country excursion. He also falls in love with a girl named Rajee in Tellicherry, but is saddened to learn that she is

Novels like 'The Awakening,' 'Corridors of Knowledge,' and 'The Farewell Party' may be included in the second group. A lecturer or professor would be the protagonist in this story. He/she is the one who reports on what's going on in the teaching community. The protagonist, usually a good instructor, is often challenged with corrupt sections of the institution or university. He attempts to keep away from the unwholesome aspects of college life and to rid it of corruption. Rita Joshi's novel "The Awakening" is distinctive in two ways. The first is that it is written in poetry, and the second is that the characters are given initials rather than names. JR, a Cambridge graduate, relocates to Delhi to pursue a career as a professor. She confronts the principal's corruption, lion hunting, and domineering character, and she protests against her, eventually succeeding in removing that bad aspect from the institution. 'Corridors of Knowledge' is about Madhava Rao's life. Madhav loses his father when he is a child and grows up under the care of his uncle. The story is entirely descriptive of his education, college and university studies, and subsequent work as a lecturer and professor. It also sheds light on the corruption that exists throughout campus's many fraternities. M.V. Rama Sarma's novel 'The Farewell Party' is about an upright teacher named Prakasam. Until his principle retires, he is not eligible for a scholarship. Later, one of his coworkers takes his place. Prakasam is troubled by the changing world's teacher-politicians and the commercialization of education. Finally, he resigns and enrols in a new rural institution, where he finds serenity and satisfaction in the tranquil setting of nature and the new campus. After five years there, he chooses to retire at the customary age of sixty and devote himself to philosophic and spiritual pursuits.

Questioning the norms of Realism in the previous century led to a questioning of the fundamental notion of "reality": certainly, this term has given writers food for thought, since the novel has always been more concerned with the literary portrayal of reality than any other genre. What exactly is reality, and how can it be defined? Is it really feasible to describe it, given that every human being has his or her unique sense of reality? One of the most well-known writers of college fiction is David John Lodge. In the year 1935, he was born in London. David Lodge is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, as well as a writer, literary critic, and editor. "Lodge's twin function as scholar and creative writer is something that reviewers seldom exclude from their assessments, and his skill in catering to both After his national service, he wrote Ginger, You're Barmy (1962), his second book after The Picturegoers, in which he reflected on his experiences (1960). Lodge's second work, The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), is written in a stream-of-consciousness style and centres on a Catholic graduate who is apprehensive about his wife's pregnancy. Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984), and Nice Work (1988) are among his later works that fall under the campus novel category. The last two have been nominated for the Booker Prize. Nice Work was also adapted into a film, with David Lodge penning the script. According to Björk, "sex, humour, and escapism seem core to Lodge's college writings." Lodge's trilogy mocks university life, and all three books are set in the same town, the fictitious University of Rummidge, which is often seen as a depiction of Birmingham. Furthermore, several of the characters appear on many occasions. As previously stated, David Lodge is both a writer and a literary critic. So, how does he explain his books' success to himself? People who are attempting to be flawless and of the utmost significance in their industry, he argues, are making themselves foolish. Furthermore, university campuses and the fights that occur there are innocuous and far removed from the lives of regular people. The issue of whether he can build a bridge between the world outside of campuses and academic life may be seen in the amount of people who have read his writings since they were first released. David Lodge discusses why there are so many opportunities for comedy and irony on college campuses. It's the contradiction between the lofty idea of seeking knowledge and the truth that university instructors and their students have the same flaws and vices as the rest of us. David Lodge speaks on his new interest with the domain of non-fiction in the preface to his 2014 collection of essays, appropriately named Lives in Writing: "As I get older, I find myself becoming more interested in and drawn to fact-based writing. This, I think, is a prevalent trend among readers as they become older, but it also seems to be a trend in current literary culture as a whole." Despite the fact that Lodge never explains how he uses or understands the highly problematic term "fact," he does list a number of genres that he categorises as "fact-based writing" par excellence, including "biography, the biographical novel, biographical criticism, autobiography, diary, memoir, confession," as well as "various combinations of these modes" (Lodge 2015b: ix). In a nutshell, specimens that Anyone familiar with David Lodge's rich oeuvre as both a novelist and a literary critic will recognise that his turn to life narratives4 – since all of the examples of "fact-based writing" that he cites are examples of life narrative – is far from novel and cannot be viewed solely as a recent development. On the contrary, Lodge's work seems to be driven by a fascination with life (whether one's own or that of others), as well as the junction of Warhead and Dichtung.

1. To study on Expansion of campus novels in India. 2. To study on Postmodernism and small world.

When the idea for campus novels was first conceived, the only people who contributed to its development were members of the English department. As time went on, the monopoly of the writers of the English department was shattered, and individuals coming from a vibrant variety of academic specialties began taking an interest in producing novels set on campus. The current Indian English campus novels that are the focus of this research also encourage an integrative way of thinking. Graduates from any field who possess the necessary aptitude and attitude are eligible to take the entrance exam, participate in group discussions, and have a personal interview in order to gain entry into an IIM. Harsh comes into contact with a student community like this in Everything You Desire.. I was excited to interact with such a varied assortment of individuals for the first time, and I couldn't wait. On campus, there were individuals from almost every state, as well as persons with a wide range of educational backgrounds, including engineers, chartered accountants, economics graduates, literary grads, and others, with engineers making up the bulk of the student body. There were a large number of new hires who had no prior work experience, but just a few individuals who had a significant amount of years of experience in the business field. These individuals were going to be my classmates for the next two years, and some of them are friends with whom I will have close ties even after that two years have passed.. The opportunity to choose one's own coursework is only one of the numerous benefits associated with pursuing higher levels of education. The students choose the classes they will take based on which ones best suit their interests and abilities. The contemporary Indian English campus novels that are the focus of this research also provide a great deal of information to the novels' readers by depicting the vast number of classes that are available. often known as CSODR, is an organisation that conducts research on a wide range of topics, including but not limited to health, economics, psychology, finance, statistics, geography, languages, and many more. In the realm of business and money, values do not suffer any kind of setback. Students are taught values as part of the process of cultivating their focused and abundant growth, with the goal of achieving a balance between the ideals of righteousness and the realities of the material world. In order to strike a healthy balance between the financial and ethical components, management students are also instructed in corporate ethics. In the book Everything You Desire, Harsh makes reference to a class called Tracking Creative Boundaries. There is no question that this is a class unlike any other.. During each of the sessions, Professor Narayan invited a visitor from the realm of the arts, whether it be from the area of theatre, music, writing, or dance. The artist discussed his experiences and even presented some of his work publicly. Up until this point, we had engaged in conversation with artists, creators of documentary films, and authors. One of the authors that we had met had an intriguing history; he had attended IIM Ahmedabad for a while, but he dropped out of school in the middle of his programme to follow his love for writing. It was he who made the decision to go with his instincts rather than act in a way that would be seen as more admirable by society. The activity for today, on the other hand, was going to be very noteworthy. The well-known actress Nadia Das was going to be in attendance for the session, and it was scheduled to start off with a dance performance in the auditorium.. Students are better able to grasp their passions and achieve their needs thanks to the vibrancy of the classes..

One of the most remarkable aspects of Quite a Good Time to Be Born is the scope of Lodge's life writing endeavour – which, as this paper will argue, is the first of many breaches of the memoir's poetics committed by the author. The preface to Lodge's mammoth, almost 500-page autobiographical book aptly captures its objective of completeness and thoroughness: "it covers, what is, at the time of writing, the first half of my life up to the age of forty." In the spare time, I'd want to write another book on the second part." Quite a Good Time to Be Born is an ultimate and all-encompassing work of life writing, in keeping with its volume. It begins with a chapter that might easily be found in a biography of the writer (after changing the first-person narrative voice to the third-person narrative

chats with his father, pictures) and the assistance of a genealogy (who was to determine whether there was any potential of his family being Jewish). In order to establish his patrimony, he first explains in detail his father's family and then his mother's family tree (always begins with the male ancestors) in accordance with the patriarchal model of life writing [my emphasis]. The opening chapter makes it clear that Quite a Good Time to Be Born is not the work of a memoirist, who recalls, but of a (self-) historian, who, to borrow Hayden White's language, "actualises events": dates, locations, descriptions, classifications, and, in the end, names them. Lodge tries to solve the "mystery" of whether he was born in a nursing home (as he was told); makes a number of claims based on various records and archives (e.g. "[T]o judge from their parents' wedding photograph..."; "according to the marriage certificate"); and wishes to formulate a number of objective (i.e. verifiable) statements (e.g. "Marriage forced on the couple by pregnancy, and the absence of any further He expresses his dissatisfaction with the inability to retrieve information and find solutions to many of the problems that "arise from an exercise like this one." The sense that Lodge's life story radically belongs to the "regime of truth" pervades the entire narrative, which offers a meticulous account of the novelist's forty years of life: his childhood and adolescence, school and university days, marriage and family life, career as a teacher and novelist, ending with the publication of Changing Places in 1975. Lodge is at pains to establish an accurate chronology of his activities (for example, various movements from and to London during World War II), and he admits to consulting all available papers and documents relating to a particular period of his life prior to writing individual sections of the book. If at all feasible, he returns to certain locations or venues in order to correctly depict them. He's preoccupied with numbers and dates. Important people, for example, have their birth and death dates, also known as their "regnal years," in brackets.

Some characteristics of postmodernism may be seen in the novel Small World. Because it is such an open-ended and all-encompassing concept, "postmodernism" defies straightforward explanation. "Fragmentation, contradiction, unreliable narrators, frequently implausible and plain impossible narratives, games, parody, paranoia, dark humour, and authorial self-reference" are some of the characteristics that are associated with postmodern literature. Comparing postmodern writers to modernists is a common way to characterise postmodern literature. Hilsk identifies some fundamental characteristics of understand not the outside world but rather the inner reality, then postmodernists have rejected the possibility of any interpretation of reality that is meaningful and full. The unlikeliest of scenarios may materialise when playing Small World. For example, Zapp's experience of being kidnapped causes him to re-evaluate his position on literature, while Perse traverses the length and breadth of the earth in search of his beloved Angelica, only to discover that she has an identical twin and the truth about Angelica's fiance. Perse does not have a happy ending despite the fact that the truth about the family dynamics is disclosed at the end and that many of the characters are brought back together. His search for love comes to an unresolved conclusion. These are some instances of the most implausible occurrences that take place in a milieu that is often considered to be realistic, namely intellectual circles. The idea that a person's life might be seen as a performance has also had an impact on how book characters are conceived of. "Various positions reflect different fictions of people, and the essence of humanity is beyond identification," says Hilsk. People take on a variety of guises, and although some of those guises are successful, others are not. The following is an excerpt from Phillip Swallow's sigh that exemplifies this point: "Basically, I failed in the role of a romantic hero. In addition to that, the literary theory was given an introduction to the school of deconstruction. Its purpose is neither to provide interpretations of the world around us, nor is it to blur the lines between literature and criticism (for which Lodge can be an ideal example). Concerning the work Small World, Morris Zapp is, at the very least initially, what is known as a "deconstructivist." Another characteristic of postmodernism is that the distinction between works of low and high literary quality is blurred, since they coexist in the same canon. Lodge makes use of a wide variety of literary devices, including excerpts from letters and song lyrics, conversations that take place on a computer screen, a card taken from a bulletin board, and many more. In the second part, we will discuss what is going on simultaneously all around the world. The story of Small Planet is told in a fragmented manner, much like the world itself. What exactly is it that Morris Zapp is up to in London while Rodney Wainwright is holed up in Cook town toiling away at his essay? What is taking place simultaneously on the board of directors of the firm TWA, which is owned by Lockheed Tristar? And what is it that Howard Ringbaum is requiring of his wife at this very moment when they are seated at the very rear of this plane? The reader is also given the opportunity to learn the identity of another literary critic who is spending the night in Chicago. The narrative

In 1988, Lodge's third and last book of his trilogy was finally released to the public. In contrast to the two books that came before it, this one investigates "the non-communication between representatives of Rum midge‘s university Arts department and the industry of its city." Nice Work also addresses the reality that British universities were impacted by reductions in their resources imposed by the central government. These reductions were mandated by the central government. In addition to this, it discusses the economic downturn that occurred in the 1980s as well as Benthamite ethics. Since the publication of Changing Places and Small World, the author has developed a new perspective on the town of Rum midge, particularly in regard to the setting. He offers his thoughts on the recent alterations. ―Even though I utilised the same mythological version of Birmingham that is named Rummage in the book that I created, Nice Work, the portrayal of the city in that book is a lot more realistic and compassionate. It was perceived not just from the point of view of the sophisticated scholar, but also from the point of view of someone who was working in local business at a period when there was significant economic trouble. (David Lodge for BBC Art, 2015)

Since the publication of Changing Places and Small World, the author has developed a new perspective on the town of Rum midge, particularly in regard to the setting. People who are attempting to be flawless and of the utmost significance in their industry, "Social change contributed in more direct ways to campus fiction's success. These are some instances of the most implausible occurrences that take place in a milieu that is often considered to be realistic, namely intellectual circles. The current Indian English campus novels that are the focus of this research also encourage an integrative way of thinking.

[1] Shridevi P.G (2017) ―The Origin and Development of Campus Novels in Indian English Literature‖ IRWLE VOL. 7 No. 2 July 201 https://worldlitonline.net/the-origin-and-development.pdf [2] Dr.Prasanta Kumar Padhi (2017) ―Indian Campus Novels: An Emerging Genre in Literary Writing‖IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science (IOSR-JHSS) Volume 22, Issue 11, Ver. 7 (November. 2017) PP 01-08 [3] ALLEN, Walter. Tradition and dream: the English and American novel from the twenties to our time. 4. Impression. London: Dent, 1974. ISBN 9780460076012. [4] BOEHMER, Elleke. Colonial and postcolonial literature: migrant metaphors. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 9780199253715. [5] LODGE, David. The campus trilogy. 2011. ISBN 978-110-1577-127. [6] LODGE, David. Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature (Boston: Routledge, 1981) 154 [7] Source for Learning English in Rural India‖ July 2011 Journal of Language Teaching and Research 2(4) DOI:10.4304/jltr.2.4.778-782 ISSN 1798-4769 . [8] V. Kalpana, (2018) Campus Novels Present Civilized Entertainment Rather Than Catharsis To The Readers: A Critical Analysis Of Campus Novels Of David Lodge (Small World) And Karan Bajaj (Keep Off The Grass) http://oldisrj.lbp.world/Article.aspx?ArticleID=7358 [9] Kukumoni Sarmah (2015)‖ An Introduction to ‗Campus Novel‘ with special reference to Cotton College‖ www.ijcrt.org © 2018 IJCRT | Volume 6, Issue 2 April 2018 | ISSN: 2320-2882 [10] Praveen Kumar Chinta(2017) ―Analysis, Characterization and Themes of Contemporary Indian Novels in English‖ https://rjhssonline.com/HTMLPaper.aspx?Journal=Research%20Journal%20of%20Humanities%20and%20Social%20Sciences;PID=2016-7-4-8.

Research Scholar, Department of English, Sardar Patel University, Balaghat