Marina MacKay - Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic

Material from the first chapters originally appeared in The Wartime Rise of The Rise of the Novel, Representations, 119 (Summer 2012), 11943, 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. I am grateful to the Representations editorial board, and especially Kent Puckett, for encouragement before this book was ever thought of. And it is only a book now thanks to Jacqueline Norton at Oxford University Press, Series Editors Allan Hepburn, Adam Piette, and Lyndsey Stonebridge, and the anonymous readers for the Press: my sincere thanks to them all for their help and encouragement.

I could not be more grateful to Feeny Watt for allowing me to quote from her fathers remarkable archive, as well as for reading a late draft of this book in its entirety. Ian Watts familyhis children Feeny and George, and his granddaughter Alison Reedhave been more generous and supportive than any author could hope for.

Most of the unpublished material quoted in what follows is deposited in Stanford Universitys Special Collections, and I am glad to have the chance to thank the unstintingly helpful Stanford archivists for help both on site and long distance. Thanks also to Bridget Gillies of the University of East Anglia Special Collections, who did so much of my work there for me, and to Miranda Rectenwald and her colleagues in the Special Collections of Washington University in St Louis, who made it possible for me to hear Watts voice for the first time by digitizing a fragile recording of a lecture Watt delivered there decades earlier. Finally, I am grateful to research staff at The National Archives for their speedy recovery of a document that I doubted had survived.

Any book must accrue many more debts than its author knows, but it is a pleasure to acknowledge mine to Nicoletta Asciuto, Miriam Bailin, Ros Ballaster, Guinn Batten, John Bender, Lara Bovilsky, Matthew Campbell, Bliss Carnochan, Robert Caserio, Mark Damazer, Lara Ehrenfried, Harris Feinsod, Jason Harding, Dillon Johnston, Peter Kalliney, Michelle Kelly, Benjamin Kohlmann, Susan Jones, Joseph Loewenstein, Deidre Lynch, Peter D. McDonald, Donald MacKay, Peter Mackay, Kate McLoughlin, Sandra Macpherson, Ashley Maher, Laura Marcus, William Maxwell, Leo Mellor, Steven Meyer, Emilie Morin, Ankhi Mukherjee, John Nash, Seamus Perry, Gill Plain, Rachel Potter, Petra Rau, Alastair Renfrew, Rod Rosenquist, Ray Ryan, Victor Sage, Corinne Saunders, Wolfram Schmidgen, Claire Seiler, Vincent Sherry, James Smith, Richard Sugg, Matthew Taunton, Julia Walker, Patricia Waugh, Clare Westall, Mark Wollaeger, and Steven Zwicker.

I owe special debts to the two colleagues closest at the end: David Dwan, for reading my work with his characteristic kindness and imagination, and Abigail Williams, for unfailing inspiration, backbone, and laughter. Finally, it was thanks to Dan Grausam that I even considered writing this book, thousands of miles away from here and in what already feels another lifetime. It would be impossible to write about lives shaped by contingency and not wonder at the luckier accidents of our own.