'One of the very best English comic novelists of the post-war era' Time Out The plot lines of The Campus Trilogy, radiating from its hub at the redbrick University of Rummidge, trace the comic adventures of academics who move outside familiar territory. Beginning in the late 60s Changing Places follows the undistinguished English lecturer Philip Swallow and hotshot American professor Morris Zapp as they exchange jobs, habitats and eventually wives. Small World sees Swallow, Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the beautiful Angelica Pabst jet-set about the international conference scene, combining academic infighting and tourism, esoteric chat and romance. And finally, the feminist lecturer Robyn Penrose swaps the industrial novel for a hard hat in Nice Work as she shadows the factory boss Victor Wilcox. Sparks fly when their beliefs and lifestyles collide.

Twentieth Century Literary Criticism is a major anthology of key representative works by fifty leading modern literary critics writing before the structuralist revolution. It is a companion volume to Modern Criticism and Theory (Longman 1988), also edited by David Lodge, which anthologises contemporary criticism as it has developed through structuralism and post-structuralist theory. Together these volumes provide the most comprehensive survey available of traditional and radical literary theory in action. The critics collected together in this volume have been drawn from England, America and Europe, and each essay has been prefaced by an editor's introduction which suggests the historical and methodological significance of the piece and gives bibliographical and biographical information. This writers collected are: M. H. Abrams, W. B. Yeats, Sigmund Freud,Henry James, Ezra Pound, T. S Eliot, Virginia Woolf, T.E. Hulme, I. A. Richards, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, William Empson, G. Wilson Hight, C. G. Jung, Maud Bodkin, Christopher Caudwell, L. C. Knights, John Crowe Ransom, Edmund Wilson, Paul Valery, D. W. Harding, Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, Yvor Wiinters, Erich Auerbach, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Schorer, Francis Fergusson, Northrop Frye, C. S. Lewis, Leslie Fielder, Alain Robbe-Grillet, George Lukacs, Richard Hoggart, Walter J. Ong, Norman O. Brown, Ian Watt, Claude Levi-Strauss, Rene Welleck, Wayne Booth, Raymond Williams, R. S. Crane, Marshall McLuhan, George Steiner, Susan Sontag, W. H. Auden, Frank Kermode.

To celebrate the acquisition of the Tom Phillips archive, the Bodleian Library has asked the artist to assemble and design a series of books drawing on his themed collection of over 50,000 photographic postcards. These encompass the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which, thanks to the ever cheaper medium of photography, 'ordinary' people could afford to own their portraits. Readers shows people reading (or pretending to read) a wide variety of material from the Bible to Film Fun, either in the photographer's studio, in their own home or holidaying on the beach. Each book contains 200 images chosen with the eye of a leading artist from a visually rich vein of social history. Their covers will also feature a thematically linked painting, especially created for each title, from Tom Phillips' signature work, A Humument.

'Perhaps because he is a good novelist himself, Mr Lodge's subjection of various writers to detailed linguistic analysis is illuminating and exciting.' - Daily Telegraph

'Something of a milestone in English criticism. an important addition to English critical writing about the genre of the novel' - Tony Tanner, The Modern Language Review

This third edition of Modern Criticism and Theory represents a major expansion on its previous incarnations with some twenty five new pieces or essays included. This expansion has two principal purposes. Firstly, in keeping with the collection's aim to reflect contemporary preoccupations, the reader has expanded forward to include such newly emergent considerations as ecocriticism and post-theory. Secondly, with the aim of presenting as broad an account of modern theory as possible, the reader expands backwards to to take in exemplary pieces by formative writers and thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Marx, Freud and Virginia Woolf.. This radical expansion of content is prefaced by a wide-ranging introduction, which provides a rationale for the collection and demonstrates how connections can be made between competing theories and critical schools. The purpose of the collection remains that of introducing the reader to the guiding concepts of contemporary literary and cultural debate. It does so by presenting substantial extracts from seminal thinkers and surrounding them with the contextual materials necessary to a full understanding. Each selection has a headnote, which gives biographical details of the author and provides suggestions for further reading, and footnotes that help explain difficult references. The collection is ordered both historically and thematically and readers are encouraged to draw for themselves connections between essays and theories. Modern Criticism and Theory has long been regarded as a necessary collection. Now revised for the twenty first century it goes further and provides students and the general reader with a wide-ranging survey of the complex landscape of modern theory and a critical assessment of the way we think - and live - in the world today.

Twentieth Century Literary Criticism is a major anthology of key representative works by fifty leading modern literary critics writing before the structuralist revolution. It is a companion volume to Modern Criticism and Theory (Longman 1988), also edited by David Lodge, which anthologises contemporary criticism as it has developed through structuralism and post-structuralist theory. Together these volumes provide the most comprehensive survey available of traditional and radical literary theory in action. The critics collected together in this volume have been drawn from England, America and Europe, and each essay has been prefaced by an editor's introduction which suggests the historical and methodological significance of the piece and gives bibliographical and biographical information. This writers collected are: M. H. Abrams, W. B. Yeats, Sigmund Freud,Henry James, Ezra Pound, T. S Eliot, Virginia Woolf, T.E. Hulme, I. A. Richards, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, William Empson, G. Wilson Hight, C. G. Jung, Maud Bodkin, Christopher Caudwell, L. C. Knights, John Crowe Ransom, Edmund Wilson, Paul Valery, D. W. Harding, Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, Yvor Wiinters, Erich Auerbach, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Schorer, Francis Fergusson, Northrop Frye, C. S. Lewis, Leslie Fielder, Alain Robbe-Grillet, George Lukacs, Richard Hoggart, Walter J. Ong, Norman O. Brown, Ian Watt, Claude Levi-Strauss, Rene Welleck, Wayne Booth, Raymond Williams, R. S. Crane, Marshall McLuhan, George Steiner, Susan Sontag, W. H. Auden, Frank Kermode.

Language of Fiction was the first book of criticism by the renowned novelist and critic David Lodge. His uniquely informed perspective - he was already the author of three successful novels at the time of its first publication in 1966 - and lucid exposition meant that the work proved a landmark of literary criticism, not least because it succeeded in communicating a radically new vision of English literature to a readership that reached well beyond the bounds of the academy. Now reissued with a new foreword, this major work from the pen of one of England's finest living writers is essential reading for all those who care about the creation and appreciation of literature.

Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain's new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons. As long as Jim can survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England' and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch's awful son Bertrand.

In a career spanning six decades, David Lodge has been one of Britain's best-loved and most versatile writers. With Varying Degrees of Success he completes a trilogy of memoirs which describe his life from birth in 1935 to the present day, and together form a remarkable autobiography. He describes the highs and lows of being a professional creative writer in several different genres, his extensive travels around the world, and the hope and desire of writers to make a significant and positive impression on their readers and audiences. Varying Degrees of Success provides the reader with a privileged insight into the working practices and the creative life of a major British novelist. 'Continuously engaging... Glimpses of the ambition and energy required to fuel the final stretch of his near 60-year career as the most dependable of novelist-critics' New Statesman 'Lodge is the best British novelist never to have won the Man Booker prize' The Times

This third edition of Modern Criticism and Theory represents a major expansion on its previous incarnations with some twenty five new pieces or essays included. This expansion has two principal purposes. Firstly, in keeping with the collection's aim to reflect contemporary preoccupations, the reader has expanded forward to include such newly emergent considerations as ecocriticism and post-theory. Secondly, with the aim of presenting as broad an account of modern theory as possible, the reader expands backwards to to take in exemplary pieces by formative writers and thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Marx, Freud and Virginia Woolf.. This radical expansion of content is prefaced by a wide-ranging introduction, which provides a rationale for the collection and demonstrates how connections can be made between competing theories and critical schools. The purpose of the collection remains that of introducing the reader to the guiding concepts of contemporary literary and cultural debate. It does so by presenting substantial extracts from seminal thinkers and surrounding them with the contextual materials necessary to a full understanding. Each selection has a headnote, which gives biographical details of the author and provides suggestions for further reading, and footnotes that help explain difficult references. The collection is ordered both historically and thematically and readers are encouraged to draw for themselves connections between essays and theories. Modern Criticism and Theory has long been regarded as a necessary collection. Now revised for the twenty first century it goes further and provides students and the general reader with a wide-ranging survey of the complex landscape of modern theory and a critical assessment of the way we think - and live - in the world today.

'Perhaps because he is a good novelist himself, Mr Lodge's sujection of various writers to detailed linguistic analysis is illuminating and exciting.' - Daily Telegraph

'Something of a milestone in English criticism ... an important addition to English critical writing about the genre of the novel' - Tony Tanner, The Modern Language Review

'in many ways the most interesting of recent books on the novel, knowledgeable and closely argued.' - William Righter, The Listener

'readable, sensitive, perceptive' - Robert Scholes, Contemporary Literature

When Philip Swallow and Professor Morris Zapp participate in their universities' Anglo-American exchange scheme, the Fates play a hand, and each academic finds himself enmeshed in the life of his counterpart on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Nobody is immune to the exchange: students, colleagues, even wives are swapped as events spiral out of control. And soon both sundrenched Euphoric State university and rain-kissed university of Rummidge are a hotbed of intrigue, lawlessness and broken vows...

A successful sitcom writer with plenty of money, a stable marraige, a platonic mistress and a flash car, Laurence 'Tubby' Passmore has more reason than most to be happy. Yet neither physiotherapy nor aromatherapy, cognitive-behaviour therapy or acupuncture can cure his puzzling knee pain or his equally inexplicable mid-life angst. As Tubby's life fragments under the weight of his self-obsession, he embarks - via Kierkegaard, strange beds from Rummidge to Tenerife to Beverly Hills, a fit of literary integrity and memories of his 1950s South London boyhood - on a picaresque quest for his lost contentment.

Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do." Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

'I drew my first breath on the 28th of January 1935, which was quite a good time for a future writer to be born in England...' The only child in a lower-middle-class London family, David Lodge inherited his artistic genes from his musician father and his Catholic faith from his Irish-Belgian mother. Four years old when World War II began, David grew to maturity through decades of great social and cultural change - giving him plenty to write about. Candid, witty and insightful, Quite a Good Time to be Born illuminates a period of transition in British society, and charts the evolution of a writer whose works have become classics in his own lifetime.

Philip Swallow, Morris Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the lovely Angelica are the jet-propelled academics who are on the move, in the air and on the make in David Lodge's satirical Small World. It is a world of glamorous travel and high excitement, where stuffy lecture rooms are swapped for lush corners of the globe, and romance is in the air...

Travelling in Europe with her family, Daisy Miller, an exquisitely beautiful young American woman, presents her fellow-countryman Winterbourne with a dilemma he cannot resolve. Is she deliberately flouting social convention in the outspoken way she talks and acts, or is she simply ignorant of those conventions? When she strikes up an intimate friendship with an urbane young Italian, her flat refusal to observe the codes of respectable behaviour leave her perilously exposed. In Daisy Miller James created his first great portrait of the enigmatic and dangerously independent American woman, a figure who would come to dominate his later masterpieces.

In this entertaining and enlightening collection, David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.

'A wonderfully candid and insightful account of a writer's life' William Boyd Luck, good or bad, plays an important part in a writer's career. In 1976 Lodge was pursuing a 'twin-track career' as novelist and academic but the balancing act was increasingly difficult, and he became a full-time writer just before he published his bestselling novel Nice Work. Readers of Lodge's novels will be fascinated by the insights this book gives - not only into his professional career but also more personal experience, such as his growing scepticism of his Catholic religion and the challenges of parenting. Anyone who is interested in learning about the creative process and about the life of a writer will find Writer's Luck a candid and entertaining guide.

Veteran rivals for an exclusive academic chair (recently endowed with $100,000 a year) do scholarly battle with each other in what the Washington Post Book World called a "delectable comedy of bad manners . . . infused with a rare creative exuberance". From the author of the award-winning Changing Places.

"A funny, intelligent, superbly paced social comedy." --The New York Times

Vic Wilcox, a self-made man and managing director of an engineering firm. has little regard for academics, and even less for feminists. So when Robyn Penrose, a trendy leftist teacher, is assigned to "shadow" Vic under a goverment program created to foster mutual understanding between town and gown, the hilarious collusion of lifestyles and ideologies that ensues seems unlikely to foster anything besides mutual antipathy. But in the course of a bumpy year, both parties make some surprising discoveries about each other's worlds--and about themselves.

The first collection of short stories from one of Britain's finest novelists and critics A nameless man who has fallen out of love with life, refuses to get out of bed, with unexpected consequences. A sociologist recalls how he learned his first and formative lesson about the oppressive power of capitalism selling newspapers and magazines up and down the platforms of Waterloo station. Some years before the era of the Pill and the Permissive Society, four university friends travel to the Mediterranean for their first holiday together, where the climate is sultry and sex is on everyone's mind. And a strong-willed young woman defies adverse circumstances to pursue the perfect wedding at all costs. These are some of the characters that populate David Lodge's shrewd, funny and delightfully entertaining short stories, collected here for the very first time. What prompted their publication in this form is a short story in itself, told by the author in his Foreword. LONGLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE 2017

In Howard's End, E.M. Forster unveils the English character as never before, exploring the underlying class warfare involving three distinct groups--a wealthy family bound by the rules of tradition and property, two independent, cultured sisters, and a young man living on the edge of poverty. The source of their conflict--Howards End, a house in the countryside which ultimately becomes a symbol of conflict within British society.

The British Museum is Falling Down is a brilliant comic satire of academia, religion and human entanglements. First published in 1965, it tells the story of hapless, scooter-riding young research student Adam Appleby, who is trying to write his thesis but is constantly distracted -- not least by the fact that, as Catholics in the late 1960s, he and his wife must rely on 'Vatican roulette' to avoid a fourth child.

When Vic Wilcox (MD of Pringle's engineering works) meets English lecturer Dr. Robyn Penrose, sparks fly as their lifestyles and ideologies collide head on. What, after all, are they supposed to learn from each other? But in time both parties make some surprising discoveries about each other's worlds -- and about themselves.