The Rise of the Novel. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The Rise of the Novel

In this influential study, Ian Watt traces the genesis and development of the most popular of all literary forms, the novel. In his penetrating and original readings of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, he investigates the reasons why the three main eighteenth-century novelist wrote in the way they did - a way resulting ultimately in the modern novel of the present day. The rise of the middle classes and of economic individualism, the philosophical innovations of the seventeenth century, complex changes in the social position of women: these are some of the factors underlying an age which produced the authors of Robinson Crusoe, Pamela and Tom Jones.

Ian Watt was Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. He served as Chairman of the English Department (1968-71), and of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature (1977-80), and was Director of the Stanford Humanities Centre from 1980 to 1985. His books include Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (1979), Conrad: Nostromo (1988) and Myths of Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan and Robinson Crusoe (1998). Professor Watt died in 1999.