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This volume brings together David Lodge's three brilliantly comic novels: Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work. which revolve around the University of Rummidge and the eventful lives of its role-swapping academics.
David Lodge is internationally celebrated as a novelist and critic, and, more recently, as a writer for television. This study examines his work from The Picturegoers (1960) to Therapy (1995). There are chapters on Lodge's early, mainly realistic, fiction; on his trilogy of campus novels, Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work; and on his interest, sometimes light-hearted, sometimes deeply serious, in Catholicism, notably in How Far Can You Go? and Paradise News. Lodge's practice as a novelist has been paralleled over the years by his work as a literary critic and theorist who is keenly interested in fictional form. There is an account of his critical writing, and the study concludes with an assessment of Lodge's achievement as a best-selling novelist with intellectual interests in criticismand theology, who has successfully brought together observant realism, metafictional consciousness and dazzling comedy.
'One of the very best English comic novelists of the post-war era' Time Out The plot lines of The Campus Trilogy, radiating from its hub at the redbrick University of Rummidge, trace the comic adventures of academics who move outside familiar territory. Beginning in the late 60s Changing Places follows the undistinguished English lecturer Philip Swallow and hotshot American professor Morris Zapp as they exchange jobs, habitats and eventually wives. Small World sees Swallow, Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the beautiful Angelica Pabst jet-set about the international conference scene, combining academic infighting and tourism, esoteric chat and romance. And finally, the feminist lecturer Robyn Penrose swaps the industrial novel for a hard hat in Nice Work as she shadows the factory boss Victor Wilcox. Sparks fly when their beliefs and lifestyles collide.
David Lodge is a much-loved novelist and influential literary critic. Examining his career from his earliest publications in the late 1950s to his more recent works, David Lodge and the Tradition of the Modern Novel identifies Lodge's central place within the canon of twentieth-century British literature. J. Russell Perkin argues that liberalism is the defining feature of Lodge's identity as a novelist, critic, and Roman Catholic intellectual, and demonstrates that Graham Greene, James Joyce, Kingsley Amis, Henry James, and H.G. Wells are the key influences on Lodge's fiction. Perkin also considers Lodge's relationship to contemporary British novelists, including Hilary Mantel, Julian Barnes, and Monica Ali. In a study that is both theoretically informed and accessible to the general reader, Perkin shows that Lodge's work is shaped by the dialectic of modernism and the realist tradition. Through an approach that draws on diverse theories of literary influence and history, David Lodge and the Tradition of the Modern Novel provides the most thorough treatment of the novelist's career to date.
When Philip Swallow and Professor Morris Zapp participate in their universities' Anglo-American exchange scheme, the Fates play a hand, and each academic finds himself enmeshed in the life of his counterpart on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Nobody is immune to the exchange: students, colleagues, even wives are swapped as events spiral out of control. And soon both sundrenched Euphoric State university and rain-kissed university of Rummidge are a hotbed of intrigue, lawlessness and broken vows...
Combining the perspectives of 18 international scholars from Europe and the United States with a critical discussion of the role of culture in international relations, this volume introduces recent trends in the study of Culture and International History. It systematically explores the cultural dimension of international history, mapping existing approaches and conceptual lenses for the study of cultural factors and thus hopes to sharpen the awareness for the cultural approach to international history among both American and non-American scholars. The first part provides a methodological introduction, explores the cultural underpinnings of foreign policy, and the role of culture in international affairs by reviewing the historiography and examining the meaning of the word culture in the context of foreign relations. In the second part, contributors analyze culture as a tool of foreign policy. They demonstrate how culture was instrumentalized for diplomatic goals and purposes in different historical periods and world regions. The essays in the third part expand the state-centered view and retrace informal cultural relations among nations and peoples. This exploration of non-state cultural interaction focuses on the role of science, art, religion, and tourism. The fourth part collects the findings and arguments of part one, two, and three to define a roadmap for further scholarly inquiry. A group of" commentators" survey the preceding essays, place them into a larger research context, and address the question "Where do we go from here?" The last and fifth part presents a selection of primary sources along with individual comments highlighting a new genre of resources scholars interested in culture and international relations can consult.
Helen Reed, a novelist in her early forties, still grieving for her husband who died suddenly a year before, is a visiting teacher of creative writing at a university where Ralph Messenger, a cognitive scientist with a special interest in Artificial Intelligence and an incorrigible womaniser, is director of a prestigious research institute. A play based on David Lodge's acclaimed novel Thinks...
Since the 1987 appearance of A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, Bryan A. Garner has proved to be a versatile and prolific writer on legal-linguistic subjects. This collection of his essays shows both profound scholarship and sharp wit. The essays cover subjects as wide-ranging as learning to write, style, persuasion, contractual and legislative drafting, grammar, lexicography, writing in law school, writing in law practice, judicial writing, and all the literature relating to these diverse subjects.
Why was the term ‘intertextuality’ coined? Why did its first theorists feel the need to replace or complement those terms – of quotation, allusion, echo, reference, influence, imitation, parody, pastiche, among others – which had previously seemed adequate and sufficient to the description of literary relations? Why, especially in view of the fact that it is still met with resistance, did the new concept achieve such popularity so fast? Why has it retained its currency in spite of its inherent paradoxes? Since 1966, when Kristeva defined every text as a ‘mosaic of quotations’, ‘intertextuality’ has become an all-pervasive catchword in literature and other humanities departments; yet the notion, as commonly used, remains nebulous to the point of meaninglessness. This book seeks to shed light on this thought-provoking but treacherously polyvalent concept by tracing the theory’s core ideas and emblematic images to paradigm shifts in the fields of science, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and linguistics, focusing on the shaping roles of Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, and Bakhtin. In so doing, it elucidates the meaning of one of the most frequently used terms in contemporary criticism, thereby providing a much-needed foundation for clearer discussions of literary relations across the discipline and beyond.
