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Popular Children's Literature and the Memory of the First World War, 1919-1939
- The Lion and the Unicorn
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 31, Number 2, April 2007
- pp. 147-161
- 10.1353/uni.2007.0016
- Article
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Due to its high casualties and the deadly nature of trench warfare, the First World War was an important influence on British culture and literature in the post-war years. This is also apparent in popular children's fiction which was used as a means of instructing the future generation in the significance of the past conflict. By analysing a selection of novels published between 1919 and 1939, this article examines which images of the war were (re)created for a child readership and whether children's fiction, like many canonized adult novels, remember the war as a horrible and futile experience.