Newcastle University Eprints
Newcastle University ePrints Jaillant L. Sapper, Hodder & Stoughton, and the Popular Literature of the Great War . Book History 2011, 14, 137-166. Copyright: The definitive version of this article, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011, is available at: DOI link to article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/bh.2011.0011 Always use the definitive version when citing. Further information on publisher website: https://www.press.jhu.edu/ Date deposited: 19th May 2014 Version of file: Published This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License ePrints – Newcastle University ePrints http://eprint.ncl.ac.uk Sapper, Hodder & Stoughton, and the Popular Literature of the Great War Lise Jaillant The late 1920s saw a boom in so-called disillusioned narratives that fo- cused on the most horrific aspects of the First World War. 1 This publishing trend, sparked by the international success of Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, provoked a mixed reaction. Many reviewers saw the antiwar narratives as pacifist propaganda, untruthful to the war they had fought and won.2 Herman Cyril McNeile shared this distrust of the debunking war books. In the preface of the 1930 reprint of his war sto- ries, he wrote: “It is the fashion now . to speak of the horrors of war; to form societies for the abolition of soldiers; generally, in fact, to say ‘Never again.’”3 Written during the conflict, the stories were first published in the Daily Mail under the penname of Sapper—a reference to McNeile’s battal- ion, the Royal Engineers.
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