What Makes Indian Campus Fiction a Bestselling Genre: An Exploration of Its Language and Themes.

The study of contemporary Indian campus fiction (ICF) has remained underexplored in academic literature, despite its bestselling status for over two decades. Hence this study seeks to explore ICF's features and salience. ICF's popularity prompts two key objectives: (i) to evaluate contemporary ICF by identifying and assessing its essential features integral to ICF; and (ii) to explore how these features reflect an underlying youth culture that contributes to its bestselling status. The methodology follows a two-step approach. First, it employs a systematic review of ICF, building on Robert F. Scott's 2004 paper, "It's a Small World, After All: Assessing the Contemporary Campus Novel", which examines secondary literature to define the style of ICF, analyzing its themes, tone, settings, characters, authors, and language. Second, the paper adopts the Theme Framework Analysis (Ritchie & Spencer, 1994) to identify emerging themes linked to youth culture and their correlation with ICF's bestselling status. The paper highlights how language and themes in ICF resonate with youth identity, driving both cultural relevance and market production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]