SOURCE: “The Professor's Novel: David Lodge's Small World,” in MLN, Vol. 104, No. 3, April, 1989, pp. 713-26.

In the following essay, Mews discusses Lodge's development of the “campus novel” genre in Small World, noting parallels to his earlier work, Changing Places. According to Mews, Lodge's version of the campus novel is international rather than local in scope, and its satire belies serious questions concerning the significance of literary criticism among its academic practitioners.

Although often proclaimed dead, the British “University Novel” and the American “Campus Novel” or “College Novel”—these terms are used synonymously by critics—seem to be in vigorous health. The somewhat recent and diverse additions to the hundreds of extant titles such as Amanda Cross’s (i.e., Carolyn Heilbrun) detective cum feminist novel, Death in a Tenured Position (1981), Robertson Davies’s intriguing tale of murder and a missing manuscript by the seventeenth-century poet Andreas Gryphius, The...