David Lodge is the author of some of the most clever, ambitious, and funny fiction written in England during the past four decades. 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, has written eleven books of literary criticism and scores of articles for academic journals. Such writings on literary theory as Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel (1966) and The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (1977) have made him one of the foremost critical speculators on the novel form. While carrying on this prolific...