SMALL WORLD
David Lodge Small World and the use of intertextuality (esp. the allusions to medieval romance)
allusions to quests for the Holy Grail, especially to Spenser's 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
When propositioned Angelica replies by quoting Keat's The Eve of St Agnes
The genre of the “campus novel”.
A campus novel, also known as an academic novel, is a novel whose main action is set in and around the campus of a university. The genre in its current form dates back to the early 1950s. Many well-known campus novels, such as Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim and those of David Lodge, are comic or satirical, often counterpointing intellectual pretensions and human weaknesses. Campus novels exploit the closed world of the university setting, with characters inhabiting unambiguous hierarchies. They may describe the reaction of a fixed socio-cultural perspective (the academic staff) to new social attitudes (the new student intake).
10. What particular literary text is alluded to at the beginning of Lodge's Small World?
In the Prologue, Lodge alludes to the General Prologue of Chaucer's `Canterbury Tales'. In turn, the first words of the first chapter (`April is the cruellest month.') are a quotation from T.S. Eliot's `The Waste Land': This citation is a kind of continuation of the reference to Chaucer, as this line of Eliot's poem alludes to the first line of `Canterbury Tales.'
To cut the long story short: in the Prologue the first lines of Chaucer are quoted, and in the first chapter the correspondent first line of The Waste Land is quoted.
11. Why does Arthur Kingfisher recover when Persse asks the right question?
Kingfisher is based on the Fisher King, a character who is a keeper of Holy Grail. In the legend, he is wounded in his groins and is not able to do anything except fishing by the river. Similarly, Arthur Kingfisher is impotent, not only physically, but also mentally. He is healed by Persse, who is based on Sir Percival, the chosen knight. He is able to heal Kingfisher thanks to his purity. Following the legend, Kingfisher was destined to be healed by Persse.