Realism In David Lodge's Nice Work

David Lodge (1935--) is highly respected and regarded as a critic and writer at work in England who is prolific in both fields. As a writer, David Lodge is mainly famous for his campus novels especially his campus trilogy: Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988). The novel discussed in this thesis is Nice Work, the last novel in Lodge's "campus trilogy" and the first completed after his early retirement from the University of Birmingham in 1987.Based on the previous researches and studies, this research paper attempts to study the realistic elements and elements of other modes of writing in Nice Work. This paper mainly consists of two parts, the first part chiefly deals with the postmodernist techniques of parodies and pastiches Lodge uses in the novel. The second part mainly discusses about the realistic elements in Nice Work in terms of its theme, plot, narrative voice, setting and its relation to history.After the detailed analysis, we can see that David Lodge's Nice Work displays not only his determination to carry on the realistic tradition, but also his interrogation of and reflection over this tradition. Actually, it is a novel about both the "Condition of England" and the "condition of realism" in England in the 1980s. Although the realistic elements are predominant in Nice Work, the sort of realism Lodge has shown in the novel is quite different from the more conventional one. Rather, it is a kind of "antimodernism", which is in essence the new development of the traditional realism in contemporary England. As Lodge claims, his novels are "basically antimodernist, but with elements of modernism and postmodernism" (Structuralism16). In combining with his continuing faith in traditional realism and elements of other modes of writing, Lodge shows his own insight in literary creation in a multi-layered variety of modes of modern novelwriting.