''Changing Places'' (1975) is the first "

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. ''The Groves of Academe'' by Mary McCarthy, published in 1 ...

" by British novelist David Lodge. The subtitle is "A Tale of Two Campuses", and thus both the title and subtitle are literary allusions to

Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian e ...

' ''

A Tale of Two Cities ''A Tale of Two Cities'' is a historical novel published in 1859 by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the ...

''. It is the first novel, followed by '' Small World'' (1984) and ''

Nice Work ''Nice Work'' is a 1988 novel by British author David Lodge. It is the final volume of Lodge's "Campus Trilogy", after '' Changing Places'' (1975) and '' Small World: An Academic Romance'' (1984). ''Nice Work'' won the ''Sunday Express'' Book ...

'' (1988).

Synopsis

''Changing Places'' is a comic novel with serious undercurrents. It tells the story of the six-month academic exchange programme between fictional universities located in Rummidge (modelled on

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the We ...

in England) and Plotinus, in the state of Euphoria (modeled on Berkeley in California). The two academics taking part in the exchange are both aged 40, but appear at first to otherwise have little in common, mainly because of the differing academic systems of their native countries. The English participant, Philip Swallow, is a very conventional and conformist British academic, and somewhat in awe of the American way of life. By contrast the American, Morris Zapp, is a top-ranking American professor who only agrees to go to Rummidge because his wife agrees to postpone long-threatened divorce proceedings on condition that he move out of the marital home for six months. Zapp is at first both contemptuous of, and amused by, what he perceives as the amateurism of British academe. As the exchange progresses, Swallow and Zapp find that they begin to fit in surprisingly well to their new environments. In the course of the story, each man has an affair with the other's wife. Before that, Swallow sleeps with Zapp's daughter Melanie, without realising who she is. She takes up with a former undergraduate student of his, Charles Boon. Swallow and Zapp even consider remaining permanently. The book ends with the two couples convened in a New York hotel room to decide their fates. The novel ends without a clear-cut decision, though the sequel '' Small World: An Academic Romance'', reveals that Swallow and Zapp returned to their home countries and domestic situations.

Biographical basis

David Lodge has stated that the character of Morris Zapp was inspired by the literary critic

Stanley Fish Stanley Eugene Fish (born April 19, 1938) is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo ...

References

;Footnotes

External links

British Council biography of David Lodge with discussion of ''Changing Places''
1975 British novels Novels by David Lodge Campus novels Novels set in Birmingham, West Midlands Novels set in California Secker & Warburg books Hawthornden Prize-winning works {{1970s-novel-stub