The post-war and postmodern English campus novel: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis and Changing Places by David Lodge

The present thesis focuses on a particular fictional event – the campus novel – having a long developmental history but largely a product of the twentieth century, which is a very complex artistic and literary period encompassing various other literary periods, and also historical and cultural periods, as well as many literary movements and trends. Its first part is twofold consisting of realism or traditional versus modernism or modernist art and literature. Modernism is the late modern experimental and innovative art standing as a self-reflection and a late modern self-criticism of modernity. The period after the 1960s is the contemporary historical, social and cultural condition, which is called postmodern period or postmodernity. It is a reaction to modernity; also, postmodern as adjective refers to a particular period in literary and perhaps cultural history and to a set of aesthetic styles and principles. The reflecting mentality and artistic practice of postmodernity is called postmodernism or postmodernist art and literature; hence postmodernism is a reflexive cultural phenomenon or attitude of the postmodern period, an aesthetic phenomenon, and a reaction to modernism as late aesthetic modernity. But there is also a period after World War 2, which lasted for some ten or fifteen years, called the post-war period and coming before the postmodern one. In the second half of the twentieth century on the whole, the most prolific and popular genre is novel, which developed a remarkable typology: Angry Young fiction (Braine, Amis, Brain, Wain), neo-realist novel, campus novel, philosophical and visionary novel (Golding, Murdoch), magical realism (Carter, Rushdie), historiographic metafiction (Swift, Ackroyd), postcolonial novel (Rushdie, Ali), and so on. The two novels that constitute the main concern of our study – Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis and Changing Places by David Lodge – represent the post-war period and the postmodern period, respectively. We embark on their comparison on the premises that they are both campus novels and as such, even if they belong to different periods and trends, they can be subject to a comparative approach in order to reveal their similarities and differences with regard to both their thematic perspectives and narrative strategies. Having the academic background, which is open to larger social and cultural contexts, as its central element, the campus novel receives in Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis a realist perspective specific to the post-war English literature of the Angry Young Man with its social and moral concerns, and the drama of individual consciousness in constructing the protagonist. A prolific novelist and literary critic, David Lodge provides his campus novel with various postmodern aspects, such as metafictional elements, intertextual perspectives, fragmentariness, and so on, while primarily employing the structuralist principle of "binary opposition" and making it acquire a structural dimension in his Changing Places.