Chapter 6 Good Comrades for Young Readers: the First World War in the Fiction of Boys’ Periodicals in Britain and Germany
In: Taking Stock – Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary ResearchSearch for other papers by Barbara Korte in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Abstract
The literature generated by the First World War is a well-researched subject. The war’s substantial representation in the fiction of popular periodicals, however, has received little systematic attention – despite the fact that this fiction, because of its periodical and serial form, accompanied readers over longer stretches of their lives and so had a special potential to affect their attitudes and feelings towards the war. This was of obvious importance in the case of periodicals read by boys before they became soldiers. In Britain, many of the young men who volunteered for military service grew up as readers of the boys’ paper Chums. It prepared them for war long before the conflict of 1914 broke out, and while the ‘Great War’ was in progress, Chums helped to maintain a pro-war attitude. This article discusses the conspicuous stability in Chums’s fiction during the war as well as the months that immediately preceded and followed it. Chums used the potential of periodicals to be topical and followed the course of the war through its major theatres, but it never changed the affirmative narrative of war-as-adventure that it had inherited from its late-imperial origins. By comparison, the German boys’ paper Der Gute Kamerad demonstrated a similarly stable interpretation of the war, but one rooted in nationalism and its Romantic legacy.