Ian Watt : the novel and the wartime critic / Marina MacKay.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

MacKay, Marina, 1975- author.

Series:

Oxford mid-century studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Watt, Ian, 1917-1999.

Watt, Ian.

Watt, Ian, 1917-1999. Rise of the novel.

World War, 1939-1945--Influence.

World War, 1939-1945.

Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.).

Physical Description:

vi, 228 pages : illustration ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2018.

Summary:

Before his masterpiece The Rise of the Novel made 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 Critic argues that many of our foundational stories about the novel-about the novel's origins and development, and about the social, moral, and psychological work that the novel accomplishes-can be traced to the crises of the Second World War and its aftermath.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 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. Prison-Camp English Department.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [205]-221) and index.

ISBN:

0198824998

9780198824992

OCLC:

1032357811