Ian Watt

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Literary critic and literary historian Ian Watt (born March 9, 1917 in Windemere, England, died December 13, 1999 in Menlo Park, Calif.) was a professor of English at Stanford University. His The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957) is an important work in the history of the genre. Although written in 1957, The Rise of the Novel is still considered by many contemporary literary scholars as the seminal work on the origins of the novel. The book traces the rise of the modern novel to philosophical, economic and social trends and conditions that become prominent in the early 18th century.

A key element Watt explores is the decline in importance of the philosophy of classical antiquities, with its various strains of idealistic thought that viewed human experience as composed of "forms" (Platonic) with an innate perfection and universality. Such a view of life and philosophy dominated writers from ancient times through the Renaissance, resulting in classical poetic forms and genres with essentially flat plots and characters. These philosophical beliefs began to be replaced perhaps in the later Renaissance, into the Enlightenment, and, most importantly, in the early 18th century. The importance of philosophers such as Locke, Descartes and Spinoza, many others who followed them, and the scientific, social and economic developments of this period began to have ever greater impact, and in place of the older classical idealism, a more realistic, pragmatic understanding of life and human behavior, which recognized human individuality and conscious experience, began to emerge. This was reflected in the novels of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, who in important ways began to write of unique individual lives and experiences lived in realistic, intersubjective (the term is Husserl's, who did not come along until the 20th century) environments. It is this focus on individual experience that characterizes the novel in Wattian terms. Something being a prose work of a certain length is not enough to classify a work as a novel--lengthy prose works have existed since ancient times, but many of these works dealt in the types characteristic of ancient philosophy. The picaresque novel is an example of such a genre.

A second major trend that Watt studies is the "rise of the reading public" and the growth of professional publishing during this period. Publishers at this time “occupied a strategic position between author and printer, and between both of these and the public” (52-3). The growth of profit concerns impelled publishers to reach out to wider reading publics, which created the need in popular writings for more individual characterization and portrayals of a greater array of different classes, peoples, ages, sexes, etc. Such detailed writings of the experiences of different people can be seen in the novelists Watt examines, and had rarely been seen before. Watt presents many statistical details in this section of the book in support of his argument.