ABSTRACT
This chapter guides us to ask any fifty literary critics, gleaned at random from the pavements of a university town, which writer best exemplifies British university fiction since 1945. Professor Pluckrose is found squashed in the Wool Court of Nesfield University, apparently by a falling meteorite. Stewart is punning his own practice as university teacher and detective story writer in the figure of Gott. J. I. M. Stewart was born in 1906, the son of the Director of Education for Edinburgh City. He returned to Britain after ten years, to a lecturing post at Queen’s University, Belfast. This is Stewart’s most openly didactic university novel, at least until the recent The Naylors. In fictional terms Oxford is the exemplary modern British university. It is true that for those interested in post-war British university fiction Innes, and his alter ego Stewart, is at once the indispensable starting-point and the high point of the entire literature.
