Lots of writers have produced parodies and pastiches of other writers. Below are some from the modern novelist, David Lodge. He sometimes writes comic novels about academic life. The extract below is from The British Museum is Falling Down, an early novel about Adam, an English Literature PhD student at the University of London. The British Museum is Falling Down contains ten parodies of other novelists, all signalled by a reference in the text just before the parody starts. Here, the 'hero' of the novel is on his Vespa scooter, stuck in traffic on his way to the British Museum library. There is a reference in the text to Mrs Dalloway's clock booming out the half-hour, alluding to Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs Dalloway. Then we get a description which comically echoes Virginia Woolf in terms of grammar and phrasing, and its 'merging' of inner and outer reality:

It partook, he thought, shifting his weight in the saddle, of metempsychosis, the way his humble life fell into moulds prepared by literature. Or was it, he wondered, picking his nose, the result of closely studying the sentence structure of the English novelists? One had resigned oneself to having no private language any more, but one had clung wistfully to the illusion of a personal property of events. A find and fruitless illusion, it seemed, for here, inevitably came the limousine, with its Very Important Personage, or Personages, dimly visible in the interior. The policeman saluted, and the crowd pressed forward, murmuring 'Philip', 'Tony', 'Margaret', 'Prince Andrew'.

(David Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down, ch. 3.)

The street scene and the reference to the 'Very Important Personage' is very like a scene in Mrs Dalloway, as is the switch between abstract inner reality and more concrete outer reality, with the thought-reporting clauses (e.g. 'he thought' and 'he wondered') being placed in the middle of the thoughts being described. But the mundane outer reality in Virginia Woolf is never quite so mundane as nose-picking!

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