Ian Watt

Before his masterpiece <em>The Rise of the Novel </em>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. <p/>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. <em>Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic </em>argues 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.<br>