Small world

Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) is a 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, as well as to studies such as Inescapable Romance by Patricia Parker. Characters discuss the romance and aspects of that genre in a way that comments directly on the action in the book. Siegfried Mews has discussed the novel's inherent analysis of the purpose of literary studies. Small World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.