"I have been a character in academic fiction at least twice," Elaine Showalter writes, "once a voluptuous, promiscuous, drug-addicted bohemian, once a prudish, dumpy, judgmental frump. I hope I am not too easily identified in either of these guises . . . although I can tell you that I preferred being cast as the luscious Concord grape to my role as the withered prune." In the days before there were handbooks, self-help guides, or advice columns for graduate students and junior faculty, there were academic novels teaching us how a proper professor should speak, behave, dress, think, write, love, and (more than occasionally) solve murders. If many of these books are wildly funny, others paint pictures of failure and pain, of lives wasted or destroyed. Like the suburbs, Elaine Showalter notes, the campus can be the site of pastoral and refuge. But even ivory towers can be structurally unsound, or at least built with glass ceilings. Though we love to read about them, all is not well in the faculty towers, and the situation has been worsening. In "Faculty Towers," Showalter takes a personal look at the ways novels about the academy have charted changes in the university and society since 1950. With her readings of C. P. Snow's idealized world of Cambridge dons, the globe-trotting antics of David Lodge's Morris Zapp, the sleuthing Kate Fansler in Amanda Cross's best-selling mystery series, or the recent spate of bitter novels in which narratives of sexual harassment seem to serve as fables of power, anger, and desire, Showalter holds a mirror up to the world she has inhabited over the course of a distinguished and often controversial career.

作者介紹：

[美]伊萊恩·肖瓦爾特（Elaine Showalter，1941— ） 美國著名女性主義批評傢，美國的女性主義文學批評的創立者之一，普林斯頓大學榮休教授。曾任美國現代語言學會（MLA）會長，享有盛譽的布剋國際文學奬評審主席（2007年）。著有《她們自己的文學：從勃朗特到萊辛》（A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing）、《女性的不適：女人、瘋狂和英國的文化，1830－1908》（The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980）、《曆史：歇斯底裏癥與現代媒體》（Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media）、《創造自己：要求女性主義的知識傳統》（Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage）、《女性文學評判人》（A Jury of Her Peers）等。

譯者：

吳燕莛 加拿大不列顛哥倫比亞大學新聞碩士，上海外國語大學英語係研究生，現任教於上海外國語大學傳媒學院。