A Tale of Two Cultures: David Lodge’s Nice Work

Abstract

Abstract

David Lodge’s novel Nice Work deals with two disparate worlds and cultures: the industrial and the academic. In observance of the officially proclaimed Industrial Year of 1986, Lodge brings the two worlds of industry and academia together via a government initiative to have a head-of-industry shadow a university lecturer, and vice versa. Lodge dramatizes the dialectical structure of the novel through the respective worlds of Vic Wilcox and Robyn Penrose and posits how these two self contained worlds approximate one another and thereby illumine and influence each other. Modelled on the ?Condition of England Novels? of the nineteenth century, Nice Workgives a realistic account of Thatcherite England of the 1980s.