"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.

作者介绍：

[美]伊莱恩·肖瓦尔特（Elaine Showalter，1941— ） 美国著名女性主义批评家，美国的女性主义文学批评的创立者之一，普林斯顿大学荣休教授。曾任美国现代语言学会（MLA）会长，享有盛誉的布克国际文学奖评审主席（2007年）。著有《她们自己的文学：从勃朗特到莱辛》（A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing）、《女性的不适：女人、疯狂和英国的文化，1830－1908》（The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980）、《历史：歇斯底里症与现代媒体》（Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media）、《创造自己：要求女性主义的知识传统》（Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage）、《女性文学评判人》（A Jury of Her Peers）等。

译者：

吴燕莛 加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚大学新闻硕士，上海外国语大学英语系研究生，现任教于上海外国语大学传媒学院。