Product Description: This volume brings together previously uncollected essays by Ian Watt, one of the major literary critics of the later 20th century, famed equally for his work on Joseph Conrad and for his pioneering investigation into the genesis of English prose fiction...read more

Ian Watt (1917-1999) has long been acknowledged as one of the finest of postwar literary critics, and among the most learned of those writing about the work of Joseph Conrad. Essays on Conrad is a collection of Watt's most characteristic essays on Conrad's work. Watt's own philosophy, as well as his insight into Conrad's work, was shaped by his experiences as a prisoner of war on the River Kwai. His moving account of these experiences completes this essential collection of Watt essays. (view table of contents)

Product Description: In Myths of Modern Individualism, the renowned critic Ian Watt treats Don Juan, Don Quixote, Faust, and Robinson Crusoe as "individualists," pursuing their own views of what they should be. The original Counter Reformation myths saw the individualism of Don Juan, Don Quixote, and Faust as a problem to be quelled by death or mockery...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Conrad's great novel is a rich study not only of a typical South American country, but of the politics of any underdeveloped country, and for this reason it is permanently topical. Ian Watt addresses Conrad's concerns when writing the work, and provides an accessible introduction, taking account of background, history and politics, and reception and influence...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

New scholarship concerning the life of the British novelist augments a critical study of Conrad's early literary development that examines his work in light of nineteenth-century social ethics and such movements as Romanticism and Symbolism (view table of contents)

A collection of essays which describes the reading audience, publication methods, and literary style of the Victorian novel and provides a critical analysis of the period's major fiction writers