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.

"Recommended." - D.L. Patey, CHOICE

"a moving portrait of a figure who subordinated self to subject matter without quite eradicating the traces of sufferings and traumas that went far beyond the experience of the subsequent generations that made up the bulk of his readership. MacKay's study is also a reminder of a moment when literary criticism seemed important in part because it was about so much more than literature." - Stefan Collini, London Review of Books

"...original and deeply moving..." - John Richetti, Eighteenth-Century Fiction