Author Description

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. 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. Marina Mackay. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 205-221) And Index.