Description: Both an intellectual biography and an intellectual history of the mid-century, this book reconstructs Ian Watt's wartime world and shows how our ideas 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.
Review Quotes: "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