Known in the United States for his critical studies of twentieth-century fiction, Malcolm Bradbury is himself a creator of fiction, the author of four novels. All four are satires. All confront well-meaning but feckless English liberal humanists with the doctrinaire. All reveal that meaning well and doing justly are not the same, and that private values--a belief in the dignity of the individual and in his right to work out his own destiny--are insufficient, even, sometimes, harmful. Yet Bradbury consistently reveals the doctrinaire as far more harmful, concerned not at all about individual men. The doctrinaire is ruthless and inhumane, whether presented as a formulaic version of liberal humanism itself, in Eating People is Wrong (1959); as the politicized liberalism of post-McCarthy America, in Stepping Westward (1965); as the radicalism of the early nineteen seventies, in The History Man (1975); or as the Marxism of a Soviet satellite, in Rates of Exchange (1983). His novels all depict something that Bradbury himself named in a commentary upon his first: "an ironic world, a world without real deliverances." Several critics maintain that Bradbury's novels are profoundly, deceitfully, conservative beneath a surface liberalism. However, as this first long study of the novels attempts to demonstrate, their conservatism is not so much political as cultural. The great Western systems, capitalism and communism, no longer offer much that is conducive to man's well-being; only liberal humanism, in its respect for the individual, holds forth some faint hope for humanity. So implies Malcolm Bradbury, whose stance in the novels is largely apolitical and who exposes the folly of his liberal humanists and the wickedness of their more doctrinaire antagonists with equally devastating wit. / Department of English

Academic fiction in its current form—as novels set on university campuses and focused on the lives of faculty—has existed since the mid-twentieth century. The genre explores the purposes and the cultures of universities and the lives of their faculty. Because universities have traditionally been insular communities that interact little with the outside world, the novels contain few non-academic characters. However, one non-academic group does appear consistently throughout the genre—the academic wives. These characters host parties, care for their husbands and children, and remain largely separate from the university structure. Although they appear in nearly all academic fiction, they have escaped notice by critics because they are secondary characters who exist largely in the background. However, a comparison of academic wives and their roles in C. P. Snow's The Masters (published 1951; set 1937), Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (published 1954; set in the early 1950s), and Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man (published 1975; set 1972) shows that these characters contribute significantly to the development of universities' cultures. Their roles both influence and respond to changes within the university structure. The academics' anxiety over the wives' potential influence on university affairs in these novels, and these women’s responses to this anxiety, enable the genre to explore the division between academics and non-academics within the university culture.