Postmodernism or Neo-Realism: On Parody in David Lodge’s Campus Novel Small World

Parody in Small World, working in both comic and meta-fictional ways, embodies the liberal humanist spirit of traditional realist novel and critical consciousness of the anti-humanist post-theories though it looks like a technique of postmodern novel superficially. Small World, as a work of neo-realism, marks a significant tendency in the development of postwar British novel, both inheriting the great realist tradition of British novel and absorbing some innovative factors of postmodernist fiction.