ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s the English campus novel, a seemingly moribund form, was given new life by two writers. One was David Lodge, whose novels of transatlantic academics, enmeshed in misunderstandings and misalliances, reworked themes aired in earlier books by himself, Malcolm Bradbury and others. The other was Howard Jacobson, whose first novel, Coming from Behind (1983), was a riotously comic version of campus fiction with its own, idiosyncratic bite.
