Giles Goat-Boy is only one of the odder of innumerable examples of a conspicuously flourishing genre in the postwar period, the campus novel. Typically written as satire, this genre usually registers not the metaphysics but, more humbly, the ironies of institutionalization. Unlike works from earlier in the century, like Owen Johnson’s best-selling football romp, Stover at Yale (1911), or throwbacks to that earlier era like Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), the postwar campus novel is most often written from the perspective of the faculty, taking as its focus one or another ludicrous
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