A Stylistic Approach to Irony in David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy

Luiza Enachi-Vasluianu holds a PhD in the field of philology, obtained from the University "Al. I. Cuza" Iasi. At present she is a lecturer at the University of Bucharest (Romania). She teaches undergraduate courses in English language and Romanian linguistics. Her research interests include linguistic stylistics and didactics.

This book proposes a stylistic approach to David Lodge's academic universe depicted in his trilogy Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work. With novels formally and subthematically distinct, not intended as a trilogy in the first place, Lodge's work has been subjected to close, not yet exhaustive, analysis. The critic studies published up to the present focus especially on the field of literary criticism and agree that irony is the unifying key of the novels in the trilogy. The novelty of this study comes from the prevalently linguistic stylistic analysis of the multifaceted academic universe. Its purpose was to validate the intuitions of the critics or of the readers, for that matter, and to emphasize new facts of style which have not been investigated so far. This led to the identification and analysis of a wide range of stylistic strategies of rendering irony, the challenging game of the literary texts of the trilogy.