This extract is taken from David Lodge's Nice Work published in 1982.

The text is a postmodern rendering of the Victorian novel but the narrator wants to parody the Victorian novel especially Victorian moods and behaviours.

The narrator is a 3^rd person omniscient intrusive narrator like in the Victorian novels as a matter of fact he uses phrases such as "let us", or he makes some  to guide the reader who is not free to make his own judgments.

The text start presenting a character, Vic Wilcox, of whom the narrator has spoke about him in the previous part; the narrator uses the character to introduce a female character: miss Robin Penrose.

The narrator guides the reader making expectations about the character: she has got a male name (in the Victorian period a lot of female writers adopted a male name to write like George Eliot, because woman in that period have to stay at home and have babies like Miss Ramsay) because teaching was a job predominantly for men.

She is also a temporary lecture at the University of Rummidge and she is usual to say "that is to say", a phrase which is parodied by the narrator by the obsessive repetition of it in the extract.

Miss Robin has got a peculiar vision of the word more similar to a postmodern teacher rather than a Victorian one.

She doesn't believe in the concept of character, a single "finite, unique soul or essence that constitutes a person's identity", she believes character is only a myth produced by the middle class and especially by the capitalists and the novelists (for her the novelist is like a capitalist of imagination because he "invents a product which consumers didn't know they wanted until it is made available") because they believe a person is "responsible for and control of his/her own destiny"  while she is sure that "the truly determined subject is he who is not aware of the discursive formations that determine him.

As a matter of fact capitalists and novelists are similar in two aspects: first of all they are suitable to show the Protestant ethic (based on the idea of progress), secondly both capitalism and novel believe in character, in the single defined individual.

Miss Robin reveals both a Victorian mentality and postmodern: on the one side she calls "classic" De Foe and Richardson's works she lives in the moment of capitalism and the industrialization especially in the phenomenon of literary massification and in the moment when novel becomes the expression of the new class, the middle class.

But, on the other side she reveals a mentality influenced by modern writers such as the ideas that we are the product of our discourses about sex, power, science and a like (very similar to the theory of Carl Jung, we are the product of the place we are born in), in addition she consider identities in a relative way as a matter of fact we adopt different behaviours in relation to the different person we are in front of (this may be an application of the theory of the relativity) , then she thinks about the relationships as a web, a concept which is typically postmodern.

Also her literary ideas show postmodern aspects for example we can recognize Eliot's theory about the impossibility of write something new and the text is only a product of intertextuality.

The character so reveal some aspects of the new culture but the narrator also makes a parody of the Victorian period.