Ian Watt

Ian Pierre Watt (born March 9, 1917 in Windermere , † December 13, 1999 in Menlo Park ) was a literary critic and literary historian .

Ian Watt went to school at Dover County School for Boys and St John's College , Cambridge . In 1939, at the age of 22, he joined the British Army and served as an infantry lieutenant until he was imprisoned by the Japanese army in Singapore in January 1942 ; he was considered "missing, presumed killed in action" ; In 1946 he returned to England and left the army.

In 1947 he received his doctorate in Cambridge and in 1952 became assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley , where he taught English for around ten years . He also taught at the University of British Columbia and the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

In 1964 he was appointed professor of English literature at Stanford University , where he taught until his retirement . In 1972 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Watt was married to Ruth Mellinkoff Watt, with whom he had a son (George Watt) and a daughter (Josephine Reed).

Works

• 2002: The Literary Imagination: Selected Essays . University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-930664-24-8 (as editor, with Bruce Thompson)
• 1979: Conrad in the Nineteenth Century . University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-04405-3
• 1973: Conrad's "Secret Agent" (Casebook). Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-07987-6 (as editor)
• 1963: Jane Austen (20th Century Views). Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-053769-1
• 1957: The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding . Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-6427-0

See also

• Media genealogy and media theory
• Marshall McLuhan
• Eric A. Havelock
• Walter Jackson Ong
• Jack Goody
• Harold Adams Innis

Web links

• Literature by and about Ian Watt in the catalog of the German National Library
• - Literary critic, author and 'great humanist' Ian Watt dies (by Diane Manuel)