Form in David Lodge's fiction : an analysis of three novels

Abstract

David Lodge (1935- )is, to date, the author of ten novels, the best known among which are his trilogy of campus novels - Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988). The campus novel (as opposed to the Varisty or Oxbridge novel) is an originally American sub-genre of the novel which came into being in the post-Second World War period, when free or state-subsidized tertiary education was first made available to British and American young people coming from the lower middle-class and the working class, who would not otherwise have been able to receive a University education. The writer of campus novels, according to Bernard Bergonzi (1995), sees the university as "a microcosm of the large society, though often physically isolated from it" (Bergonzi p.14). In the campus novel, the most "positive" or sympathetic characters tend to hail from the lower middle-class (like Persse McGarrigle in Small World), while characters with upper middle-class or aristocratic backgrounds (like the Welch family in Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim [1954]) are, more often than not, made the butts of satire and the author's mischievous wit.