Ian Watt The Novel and the Wartime Critic [Hardcover]

Before his masterpieceThe Rise of the Novelmade him one of the most influential post-war British literary critics, Ian Watt was a soldier, a prisoner of war of the Japanese, and a forced labourer on the notorious Burma-Thailand Railway.

Both an intellectual biography and an intellectual history of the mid-century, this book reconstructs Watt's wartime world: these were harrowing years of mass death, deprivation, and terror, but also ones in which communities and institutions were improvised under the starkest of emergency conditions.Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Criticargues that many of our foundational stories about the novelabout the novel's origins and development, and about the social, moral, and psychological work that the novel accomplishescan be traced to the crises of the Second World War and its aftermath.

Preface
1. Lt Ian Watt, POW
2. Defoe's Individualism and the Camp Entrepreneurs
3. Richardson, Identification, and Commercial Fantasy
4. Chaos in the Social Order: Fielding and Conrad
5. Realist Criticism and the Mid-Century Novel
6. The Prison Camp English Department

Recommended. -- D.L. Patey,CHOICE

a moving portrait of a figure who subordinated self to subject matter without quite eradicating the traces of sufferings and traumas that went far beyond the experience of the subsequent generations that made up the bulk of his readership. MacKay's study is also a reminder of a moment when literary criticism seemed important in part because it was about so much more than literature. -- Stefan Collini,London Review of Books

Marina MacKay,Associate Professor in the Faculty of English and Tutorial Fellow of St Peter's College, University of Oxford

Marina MacKay is Associate Professor of English and Tutorial Fellow of St Peter's College, University of Oxford. Her books includeModernism and World War II(2007) andThe Cambridge lc�