Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780198824992)

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.

Author: Marina MacKay
ISBN-10: 0198824998
ISBN-13: 9780198824992
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 01/29/2019
Pages: 238
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.70w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 08/01/2019