David Lodge is the author of some of the most clever, ambitious, and funny fiction written in England during the past quarter century. His fifth novel, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), won the Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize for 1975, and his sixth novel, How Far Can You Go" (1980), was selected as the Whitbread "Book of the Year" for 1980. He has combined the writing of fiction with a keen interest in its theory, and, in addition to his novels, he has written six books of literary criticism and numerous articles for academic journals. His writings on literary theory, especially Language of Fiction (1966) and The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), have made him one of the foremost critical speculators on the novel form. While carrying on this prolific writing career, he has been a professor of English literature at the University of Birmingham.

Lodge's novels have...