Small World is David Lodge?s follow up to he best selling and prize winning novel Changing Places, once again we are reunited with the world of academics, Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp the English and American Lecturers in Literature respectively, and a new gang of literary characters. If you are now sitting there saying ?what?, I will recap, in Changing Places Lodge explored the world of academia, swapping the teaching roles and locations of the American, Morris Zapp and the Englishman, Philip Swallow. What resulted was a book heavy in farce with a clever analysis of the academic world. But having left the book on a knife-edge, Lodge was badgered to write a ...  Read the complete review

Take pity on me. Please, take pity on me. I was one of the unfortunate souls who has been forced to study literary criticism as part of my degree studies. And I absolutely hated it. To me a story is there to be read. There is absolutely no point in trying to analyse a book to try and find out if there is, in the subtext, an indication of what the author had for breakfast on the day he or she was waiting for a letter from the publishers. The only possibly useful analysis, in my view, is the one where you work out whether there is an element of historical bias, whether the book is more of a product of its times than just a product. Besides, I never understood it. ...  Read the complete review