Ian Watt (1917-1999)
Related: history of fiction - literary criticism - literature - modern novel - novel
The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957) - Ian Watt [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Biography
Literary critic and literary historian Ian Watt (1917-1999) was a professor of English at Stanford University. His The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957) is an important work in the history of the genre. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Watt [Mar 2005]
Due to the influence of Ian Watt's seminal study in literary sociology, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957), Watt's candidate, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), gained wide acceptance. But with the rise of feminist criticism in the 1970s and 1980s and its concomitant rediscovery of forgotten writings by women, it is now more often argued that Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) is the “first English novel”. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_novel_in_English [Mar 2005]
Historians of the novel
Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) still dominates attempts at writing a history of the novel. Watt's view is that the critical feature of the 18th-century novel is the creation of psychological realism. This feature, he argued, would continue on and influence the novel as it has been known in the 20th century. Michael McKeon brought a Marxist approach to the history of the novel in his 1986 The Origins of the English Novel. McKeon viewed the novel as emerging as a constant battleground between two developments of two sets of world view that corresponded to Whig/Tory, Dissenter/Establishment, and Capitalist/Persistent Feudalist. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustan_literature#Historians_of_the_novel [Nov 2005]The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957) - Ian Watt
The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957) - Ian Watt [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Around 1740, England's taste for scandal decreased, and the desire to reform morals and manners took hold. Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) often is seen as the first novel embodying this new social trend. In it, he claimed he would "instruct" and "entertain"; it became one of the first "bestsellers". It is the story of maid, who, through chastity, wins the heart of her master and becomes his wife. Richardson's contemporary readers were treated to what they identified as a new level of lietrary "realism" in Pamela; Ian Watt argues that this novel inaugurated the psychological novel genre, because it focused on the psyche of one character, though many argue that this distinction should be awarded to William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1795). --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel [Mar 2005]
see also: literature - novel