The campus novel in Eastern and Central European literature after 1989

Campus novel, traditionally seen as a genre of English and American literature, has recently also gained attention in non-Anglophone literary traditions. The article focuses on campus fiction written in Slovak, Czech, Polish, and Ukrainian after 1989. It provides a brief introduction to the terminology and classification of the campus novel within the Anglo-American literary tradition, offering a perspective on Central European campus fiction through this lens. It traces its genre hybridity and the dominant genres with which it is associated, such as satire, social detective fiction, historical detective fiction, metafiction, biography, and the Bildungsroman. It also indicates the historical periods in which the genre is set and the traits of the professor as protagonist. While campus satire is a shared feature of Slovak, Czech, Polish, and Ukrainian literature in response to political change, each national literature emphasizes themes unique to its own literary and cultural traditions. These include the founding of Polish universities, identity and the reassessment of Ukrainian professors’ lives, the ironic treatment of the communist era in Czech and Slovak literature, and metafiction in Slovak literature.