The Small Worlds of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge

Abstract

In Small World (1984), David Lodge shows how cheap air travel and the frequency of international conferences have transformed the world’s scattered university campuses into a single global campus — a ‘small world’ in which everyone in a given subject area knows almost everyone else. Lodge is interested in the global campus not only because it is familiar to him (he was Professor of English at the University of Birmingham until his retirement in 1987), but because the university world is in his view ‘a kind of microcosm of society at large, in which the principles, drives and conflicts that govern collective human life are displayed and may be studied in a clear light and on a manageable scale’.¹ To date, he has observed these principles, drives and conflicts in eight novels, some concerned with the university world, and others with another world he knows at first hand — that of English Catholicism.² Though his novels differ in subject matter, they resemble each other in that the fictional worlds he creates in them are all small worlds, limited in their setting and time scheme, and in the number and range of their characters.