Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) is a campus novel by the British writer David Lodge. It is the second book of Lodge's "Campus Trilogy", after Changing Places (1975) and before Nice Work (1988). Small World uses the main characters (Professors Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp and their wives) from Changing Places and adds many new ones. It follows them around the international circuit of academic literary conferences. It is highly, and self-reflexively, allusive to quests for the Holy Grail, especially to Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, as well as to studies such as Inescapable Romance by Patricia Parker. Characters discuss the romance and aspects of that genre in a way that comments directly on the action in the book. Siegfried Mews has discussed the novel's inherent analysis of the purpose of literary studies. Small World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Summary The book begins in April 1979 at a small academic conference at the University of Rummidge. It is the first conference that Persse McGarrigle (a reference to Percival the grail knight), an innocent young Irishman who recently completed his master's thesis on T. S. Eliot, has attended. He teaches at the fictional University College, Limerick, after having been mistakenly interviewed because the administration sent the interview invitation to him instead of someone else with the same last name. Several important characters are introduced: Rummidge professor Philip Swallow, American professor Morris Zapp (inspired by the literary critic Stanley Fish), retired Cambridge professor Sybil Maiden, and the beautiful Angelica Pabst, with whom McGarrigle falls immediately in love. Much of the rest of the book is his quest to find and win her. Angelica tells Persse that she was adopted by an executive at KLM, Hermann Pabst, after she was found, abandoned, in the washroom of an aeroplane in flight. Persse professes his love for her, but she leaves the conference without telling him where she has gone. Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow, who are seeing each other for the first time in ten years after the events of Changing Places, have a long evening talk. Since the previous novel, Swallow has become a professor and head of the English Department. Zapp has discovered deconstructionism and reinvented himself academically. Swallow tells Zapp about an incident a few years before, when after almost dying in a plane crash he spent the night at a British Council official's home and slept with