Despite the fact that the American academic novel has been well received by critics and readers alike, it is still relatively unknown and unexplored within the Croatian context. This dissertation offers the hypothesis that the academic novels as literary artifacts of their time are a part of interplay of discourses in higher education, which they both shape and are shaped by. Its purpose was to locate the discourses of the academic novels within other contemporaneous nonliterary discursive practices, in order to recover the socio-historical context of their production. The analysis was done within the framework of new historical literary criticism with an emphasis on the historicity of the texts as well as the historical context in which the works were written. Although the theoretical approach of new historicism has been previously used mostly in the analyses of works of the earlier literary periods, this thesis posits the use of new historicism to analyze more recent literary works and thereby open up new possibilities of literary and historical analysis. The subject of investigation was the politics of higher education and American academic fiction as represented in Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952), Randal Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution (1954), May Sarton’s A Small Room (1961), John Williams’ Stoner (1965), Gail Godwin’s The Odd Woman (1974) and Alison Lurie’s The War Between the Tates (1974). The study comprises the academic novels from the 1950’s to the 1980’s and traces the continuation of the genre through the turn of the century. In the light of recent trends in Central Europe of nearing western standards in education, detailed insight into the American educational system, as well as the problems faced by the American academic community, may contribute to a better understanding of academic structures as well as advance the implementation of the ongoing transitional and integration processes. Therefore, the range of possibilities offered by works of this genre surpasses the literary-theoretical discourse and represents a very valuable source of experience and knowledge, contributing to the domestic and foreign scholarly exchange.