Elements of the Holy Grail Quest in David Lodge’s “Small World”

Doreen Bärwolf

sept. 2010 · GRIN Verlag

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Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 2,7, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Anglistisch/Amerikanistisches Institut), course: Hauptseminar: King Arthur, language: English, abstract: David Lodge was born 1935 in South London as the child of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. He was raised in the middle class and went to Catholic schools. With the age of 22 he became postgraduate student for English literature at the University college of London. In 1960 he became a lecturer at the Birmingham University and published his first novel The Picturegoers. Being a lecturer he discovered the field of literary criticism and wrote his first critical book Language of Fiction. After touring the USA and studying at the Brown University and at Berkeley he was so inspired by travelling and the academic world that he wrote Changing Places. This academic novel about travelling teachers of literature was the first part of a trilogy together with Small World and Nice Work. All three of them were pioneering for modern fiction of the 20th century. For Changing Places David Lodge won the Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize. Small World, as well as Nice Work, were shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Nice Work was Sunday Express Book of the year and actually adapted for Television. All three of them showed the academic world in a new light. After World War II more people from middle class went to Universities and the competition between the Universities as well as the scholars became harder. Travelling around the world from conference to conference was on the day’s schedule of every scholar. David Lodge used this milieu and mixed it with humour and sarcasm and so innovated fiction writing of today. This paper is about David Lodge’s Small World and its linking to the King Arthur myth especially to the knight Perceval and the Holy Grail. The connection between the novel and the legend results from David Lodge’s knowledge of both, the academic world and the medieval literature. He mixed them so to create a modern version of Perceval’s quest for the Holy Grail.