Small World: An Academic Romance
First edition
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| Author | David Lodge |
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| Cover artist | Wendy Edelson |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Campus novel |
| Publisher | Secker & Warburg |
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Publication date
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1984 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
| Pages | 339 pp (hardcover) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 10513214 |
| LC Class | PR6062.O36 S64x 1984 |
| Preceded by | Changing Places |
| Followed by | Nice Work |
Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) is a humorous campus novel by the British writer David Lodge. It is the second book of Lodge's "Campus Trilogy", after Changing Places (1975) and before Nice Work (1988).
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 Edmund Spenser's The 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 miniseries, Small World, for British television in 1988.
The book begins in April 1979 at a small academic conference at the University of Rummidge. It is the first conference that Persse McGarrigle, (a reference to Percival the grail knight), an innocent young Irishman who recently completed his master's thesis on T. S. Eliot, has attended. He teaches at the fictional University College, Limerick, after having been mistakenly interviewed because the administration sent the interview invitation to him instead of someone else with the same last name. Several important characters are introduced: Rummidge professor Philip Swallow, American professor Morris Zapp, retired Cambridge professor Sybil Maiden, and the beautiful Angelica Pabst, with whom McGarrigle falls immediately in love. Much of the rest of the book is his quest to find and win her. Angelica tells Persse that she was adopted by an executive at KLM after she was found, abandoned, in the washroom of an aeroplane in flight. Persse professes his love for her, but she leaves the conference without telling him where she has gone.
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