The Campus Trilogy: Changing Places; Small World; Nice Work

By David Lodge

Book Overview

"A trio of dazzling novels in a comic mode that the author has now made completely his own...a cause for celebration." - The New York Times Book Review David Lodge's three delightfully sophisticated campus novels, now gathered together in one volume, expose the world of academia at its best-and its worst. In Changing Places , we meet Philip Swallow, British lecturer in English at the University of Rummidge, and the flamboyant American Morris Zapp of Euphoric State University, who participate in a professorial exchange program at the close of the tumultuous sixties. Ten years later in Small World , older but not noticeably wiser, they are let loose on the international conference circuit-along with a memorable and somewhat oversexed cast of dozens. And in Nice Work , the leftist feminist Dr. Robyn Penrose at Rummidge University is assigned to shadow the director of a local engineering firm, sparking a collision of ideologies and lifestyles that seems unlikely to foster anything other than mutual antipathy.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143120204
• ISBN13: 9780143120209
• Release Date: October 2011
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 832 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 5.4" x 8.4"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A Magnificent Cross Cultural Comedy of Errors

If you know the Brits and the unabashed Americans, you will love this satiric view of both, from both sides of The Pond. Very funny, gently (and not so gently) lambasting caricatures of Englishness and American Exceptionalism. From quiet chuckles to laugh-out-loud, tears-running-down-your-face funny.

a trip

As one who once was impoverished in a New Haven boarding house desperately trying to come up with an exceptional paper in English seminar, I am satisfied to have failed and moved on to law and managing real estate. These novels are delightful and tours de force of narrative. Anyone will enjoy them, but it helps to have had a touch with academe. Will also provide council to those outside wondering about paying for their daughter's further education. I say save the money for dance lessons.

Great send -up of academia!

David Lodge's campus novel trilogy are three very clever novels. The first (Changing Places)is a comic analysis of British and American university systems, as well as a parody of narrative structures (with each chapter written in a different style). The second (Small World) is a comic take on academic conferences, as well as a parody of Arthurian legend. The third (Nice Work) mocks both the 19th-century British industrial novel and literary theory. These are funny books for any literate reader, but are hilarious for anyone who has experience in academia!