Dr%20Marina%20Mackay: List of publications

Before his masterpiece The Rise of the Novel made him one of the most influential post-war British literary critics, Ian Watt was a soldier, a prisoner of war of the Japanese, and a forced labourer on the notorious Burma-Thailand Railway. Both an intellectual biography and an intellectual history of the mid-century, this book reconstructs Watt's wartime world: these were harrowing years of mass death, deprivation, and terror, but also ones in which communities and institutions were improvised under the starkest of emergency conditions. Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic argues that many of our foundational stories about the novelabout the novel's origins and development, and about the social, moral, and psychological work that the novel accomplishescan be traced to the crises of the Second World War and its aftermath.

The modernist period was an era of world war and violent revolution. Covering a wide range of authors from Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy at the beginning of the period to Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett at the end, this book situates modernism's extraordinary literary achievements in their contexts of historical violence, while surveying the ways in which the relationships between modernism and conflict have been understood by readers and critics over the past fifty years. Ranging from the colonial conflicts of the late 19th century to the world wars and the civil wars in between, and concluding with the institutionalization of modernism in the Cold War, Modernism, War, and Violence provides a starting point for readers who are new to these topics and offers a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the field for a more advanced audience.

This essay argues that the wartime institutionalisation of emergency governmental powers and the expectation of their continuance under a post-war socialist administration led to a pervasive anti-statism indistinguishable from anti-Communism in the mid-century British novel. Focusing on less-read dystopias of the period, Rex Warner's The Aerodrome (1941) and C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength (1945), I argue that these conservative novels are best understood as extreme iterations of a more widespread anxiety about the potentially totalitarian elements of a centralising and technocratic democracy at war.

In this full-length study of modernism and World War II, Marina MacKay offers historical readings of Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, T. S. Eliot, Henry Green and Evelyn Waugh set against the dramatic background of national struggle and ...