The campus novel, invariably a satire on the university community, typically touches on the subjects of sex, money, power, adultery, or professional rivalry. Tom Sharpe's novels cover similar topics. They are, however, crammed with vulgarity, chauvinism and black humour. The purpose of the article is to analyse Tom Sharpe’s satirical style considering the author's apparent refusal to accept the boundaries of taste and decency. The article will focus on three novels, Porterhouse Blue, Wilt and The Wilt Alternative, which ridicule academics but also contemporary society at large. Sharpe introduces a whole parade of unusual characters, arranges for them a series of preposterous situations and spices his plots with grotesque and sometimes repellent episodes.
The purpose of the article is to present the campus novel from an angle that would expose the qualities latent in a genre by pointing to the theme of conflict. The paper has been divided into three parts, each addressing one kind of conflict which can be distinguished from the generic pattern (the story about academics in the university setting). The analysed themes are recurrent in the campus novel – a town and gown row, a teacher-teacher conflict, and a clash between a teacher and a student. The conflicts are illustrated by works of David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury and Kingsley Amis.
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