Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic (Oxford Mid-Century Studies Series)

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. Acknowledgements 6 Contents 8 Introduction 10 1. Lt Ian Watt, POW 23 2. Defoe’s Individualism and the Camp Entrepreneurs 68 3. Richardson, Identification, and Commercial Fantasy 101 4. Chaos in the Social Order: Fielding and Conrad 128 5. Realist Criticism and the Mid-Century Novel 160 6. The Prison-Camp English Department 192 Bibliography 214 Index 232