A Study Of Englishness In David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy

David Lodge(1935-)is a well-known novelist and literary critic of contemporary English literature.His campus trilogy,which has received great attention from readers and critics both at home and abroad,has been studied and analyzed from multiple perspectives.This owes not only to Lodge?s truthful and satiric presentation of the life of professors in academia,but also the implications that are drawn by the social and cultural structure of the life in contemporary England which shed much light on the understanding of the national character of the British people in the postwar society.This leads to the study of Englishness and its deviations in the campus trilogy of David Lodge.As a literary genre concerning the life of university teachers,Lodge?s campus trilogy characterizes many scholars who are far from the traditional images of British gentlemen and cultured people.They are now more like ones who are involved in the life characteristic of the consumer society,pursuing higher reputation,better social status and more wealth instead of the cultivation of minds,search for truth and taking the lead in culture in the whole society.Therefore,this thesis takes Lodge?s campus trilogy as the object of study,trying to explore how Englishness has fallen through the analysis of the characters and their moral values that are alienated by hedonism,philistinism and consumerism.The analysis of the fall of Englishness as is implied in Lodge?s campus trilogy is mainly focused on the protagonists.Firstly,masculinity that is regarded as the typical feature of traditional British men suffers from crisis now.Secondly,the classical gentry culture gets disrupted so that the male protagonists have lost the color of being gentlemen.Thirdly,as intellectuals,the culture endowed to them both in the sense of knowledge and in the sense of human mind has been taken as something for exchange.The traditional national peculiarities of faithfulness,nobility,truth,responsibility,honesty on the part of the British men are mostly subverted by their betrayal of love,vulgarity in manners and behaviors,dishonesty in academic research,etc.However,this thesis concludes with the finding that Lodge uses the technique of open–ending at the end of the stories,to imply that,facing the chaotic and disordered society,Lodge still cherishes the hope that humanism can help with the recovering,and that Englishness is in the hope of being regained.