Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents [Hardcover]

a welcome addition to the literature on academia and academics. (John Dreijmanis, Higher Education Review )

This study is enjoyable... and always stimulating. (Caroline Moore, The Spectator )

Clarity and style... Overall, this book is to be welcomed as a valuable addition to the critical commentaries on developing genres in the novel. As we have come to expect from Elaine Showalter, the insights are amny and incisive, and the style is always rich and entertaining, with a workable balance of scholarship and subjective reflection. It will surely be auseful book for students of the modern novel, and also something that will be complementary to maintain genre studies in literature.

Her survey has all the stylistic snappiness and relish for mischief that marks the funniest books she cites. (Boyd Tonkin, The Independent )

Showalter's knowledge of the Professorroman is as impressive as her interest is genuine...Showalter benefits from a confident style and is very precise (Modern Language Review )

"Her survery has all the stylistic snappiness and relish for mischief that marks the funniest books she cites."

This study is enjoyable... [and] always stimulating.

"This study is enjoyable... and always stimulating."

"This study is enjoyable... and always stimulating."

"Her survey has all the stylistic snappiness and relish for mischief that marks the funniest books she cites."

a funny and thoughtful account

In the days before there were handbooks, self-help guides, or advice columns for graduate students and junior faculty, there were academic novels teaching us how a proper professor should speak, behave, dress, think, write, love, and (more than occasionally) solve murders. If many of these books are wildly funny, others paint pictures of failure and pain, of lives wasted or destroyed. Like the suburbs, Elaine Showalter notes, the campus can be the site of pastoral and refuge. But even ivory towers can be structurally unsound, or at least built with glass ceilings. Though we love to read about them, all is not well in the faculty towers, and the situation has been worsening. In Faculty Towers, Showalter takes a personal look at the ways novels about the academy have charted changes in the university and society since 1950. With her readings of C. P. Snow's idealized world of Cambridge dons or of the globe-trotting antics of David Lodge's Morris Zapp, of the sleuthing Kate Fansler in Amanda Cross's best-selling mystery series or of the recent spate of bitter novels in which narratives of sexual harassment seem to serve as fables of power, anger, and desire, Showalter holds a mirror up to the world she has inhabited over the course of a distinguished and often controversial career.

Elaine Showalter is Professor Emeritus of English and Avalon Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, where she received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2003. Her books include A Literature of Their Own (1977); These Modern Women: Autobiographies of American Women in the 1920s (1978); The New Feminist Criticism (1985); The Female Malady: Women, Madness and Culture (1985); Sexual
Anarchy: Gender and Creativity in the Fin-de-siècle (1990); Sister's Choice: Traditions and Change in American Women's Writing (1991); Hystories (1997); Inventing Herself (2001); Teaching Literature (2002); and Faculty Towers (2005). In addition, she has edited more than twenty anthologies and editions, and has published over 100 articles on British and American fiction.