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.

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,3, Technical University of Darmstadt (Institut für Literatur- und Sprachwissenschaft), course: The Rise of the English Novel, language: English, abstract: Standing at an international airport or a huge train station, we can observe two ways in which travellers spend their leisure time while waiting for their plane or train. Either, they are buying food or souvenirs, or they are reading. Some read their daily newspapers, others their favourite comics and some are hidden behind big books. Presumably, the majority of the people who are holding the big books are reading novels containing love stories, thrillers or something similar. While reading these stories, they are probably on a journey together with the protagonist of the plot, experiencing perhaps unknown or, to them, unfamiliar, but interesting and exciting situations. These people are travelling in their minds to far distant places while they are actually travelling, for example, to their working place, their home or to their holiday resort. What is true now, has been true then. Some people in the 18th century, who had the possibility to travel, took some travel accounts with them on their journey and read them while actually travelling themselves. Others who had to stay at home travelled, as well, by reading books. Although they were in different positions, they shared their love for reading and travelling. This term paper will analyse the connection between the two popular leisure time activities in 18th century Britain, i.e. travelling and reading novels.

Includes entries for maps and atlases.

Studies include Pamela, Silas Marner, The Mayor of Casterbridge, A passage to India, Brighton Rock, A clockwork orange.

Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.