Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) is a humorous "campus novel" by the British writer David Lodge. It is a sequel to Lodge's 1975 novel, Changing Places.
Small World uses the main characters (Professors Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp and their wives) from Changing Places and adds many new ones. It follows them around the international circuit of academic literary conferences. It is highly, and self-reflexively, allusive to quests for the Holy Grail, especially to Spenser's Faerie Queene. Characters discuss the romance and aspects of that genre in a way that comments directly on the action in the book, and an important (but physically and intellectually impotent) literary theorist is named Arthur Kingfisher in direct reference to Arthurian legend and the Fisher King.
Small World was turned into a six-hour mini-series for British television in 1988.
Read more about Small World: An Academic Romance: Summary, Biographical Basis
Famous quotes containing the word academic:
“If twins are believed to be less intelligent as a class than single-born children, it is not surprising that many times they are also seen as ripe for social and academic problems in school. No one knows the extent to which these kind of attitudes affect the behavior of multiples in school, and virtually nothing is known from a research point of view about social behavior of twins over the age of six or seven, because this hasn’t been studied either.”
—Pamela Patrick Novotny (20th century)