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.

• Preface


• 1: Lt Ian Watt, POW


• 2: Defoe's Individualism and the Camp Entrepreneurs


• 3: Richardson, Identification, and Commercial Fantasy


• 4: Chaos in the Social Order: Fielding and Conrad


• 5: Realist Criticism and the Mid-Century Novel


• 6: The Prison Camp English Department

Marina MacKay is Associate Professor of English and Tutorial Fellow of St Peter's College, University of Oxford. Her books include Modernism and World War II (2007) and The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel (2010). Her articles on mid-century writing have appeared in a range of journals including PMLA, ELH, and Literature & History.