This essay examines three academic novels written in close conjunction: Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night, and C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. When the academic novel emerged as a genre in the 1930s and 1940s, all three authors experimented with its undefined boundaries by combining realist depictions of academic life with genres of fantasy, detective novel, and ‘thriller’. This hybridity allowed them to dramatize issues of intellectual integrity, giving footnotes and faculty meetings life-and-death stakes. Each novel’s satire is shaped by its author’s experiences on the margins of academic institutions in ‘alt-ac’ careers of publishing, translation, and public writing. All three novels also take up the issue of women’s integration into higher education. The negative view of female scholars expressed in That Hideous Strength is best understood as an experiment with genre, which subordinates realistic characters to masculine and feminine archetypes.

The paradox of man as a unity of matter and spirit preoccupied the thought and imagination of Tolkien to a deep degree. Indeed, in a number of places, Tolkien identifies the main theme or purpose of his work being an exploration of ‘Death, and Immortality’. By introducing two races within his legendarium that reflect two different ontological relations to the world, Tolkien could explore the subtlety of this paradox that is the current condition of man against other possible relations to shed further light on man's actual relationship with time and eternity. As Tolkien's imaginative work directly engages with the nature of body and soul, and man's experience as embodied spirit, this paper seeks to examine some aspects of Tolkien's anthropology as sketched throughout his work, in order to see what his formulation in the mode of myth can contribute to deepening the principles given in a classical anthropology.