Liked Netflix's The Chair? Here are 4 moving, funny novels set in English departments

By Lucas Thompson, Lecturer, Department of English, University of Sydney

English departments are strange places. Even to those of us who spend our working lives inside them, they can seem utterly mysterious. Those looking in from outside must find them even more baffling. What exactly do lecturers do all day? They teach and interact with students, but what happens the rest of the time?

Literary scholars everywhere, writes Terry Eagleton, “live in a state of dread – a dread that one day, someone … will suddenly get wise to the fact that…

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