The Spatial Narrative Art Of David Lodge’s Small World

David Lodge is one of the most prominent novelists and critics in contemporary Britain. He has created sixteen novels and fourteen literary critical books. Most of his fictions deal with the issues related to academe. Small World is his masterpiece, which is also one of his serial novels, Campus Trilogy.Since the publication of its Chinese edition in the early1990s, Small World has drawn favorable attentions in the Chinese literary world. Scholars approach it with diverse literary theories. However, few researchers pay attention to its narrative art of spatialization. This study, by using the method of close reading and application of the spatial form theory, conducts an analysis on spatial narrative in Small World, and interprets how the narrative art is realized in this spatial form.As traditional linear narrative has been challenged in the twentieth century, a large amount of spatial narrative appears. Joseph Frank presents the spatial form theory for the first time in his famous essay Spatial Form in Modern Literature in1945. Frank believes that spatial form is a form in which the author deliberately breaks the linear sequence of events into a synchronic one by adopting several narrative methods, so that the reader must weave those seemingly illogical but thematically interrelated factors into a space in his imagination by the reading method of "reflexive reference".1This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One introduces the previous studies on Small World and spatial form theory. Chapter Two explores how juxtaposition, works as an effective way to spatialize the narrative structure in Small World. The author achieves the spatial narrative art by juxtaposing many events simultaneously, using three story lines to break the linear narrative. Chapter Three mainly discusses how narrative perspective is used to create the spatial narrative art in Small World, which is fully embodied in the narrative perspective of Persse, the protagonist of Small World. In addition, the shift of multiple characters’narrative perspective contributes to the spatial narrative art. Chapter Four focuses on the spatialized text of Small World with the device of intertextuality. The text of Small World is not closed or linear. David Lodge creates a space between Small World and other texts by the craft of intertextuality, providing more "reflexive reference" and making its meaning of this fiction more profoundly. The last chapter concludes that Small World, as a successful spatial narrative work, is significantly different from traditional ones in the expression of thoughts, artistic form, reading habits and meaning interpretation.