Social Remembering, Disenchantment and First World War Literature, 1918–1930

Abstract

The way that the First World War would be remembered was yet to be solidified in the years immediately after the Armistice and peace treaties. Using key case studies from the years 1918 to 1930 by combatant authors Gilbert Frankau, Ernest Raymond, C.E. Montague, R.C. Sherriff and Richard Aldington, this article charts the development of the complex relationship between the dominant heroic mode and emergent modern disenchantment. Theories of social remembering provide a valuable framework for understanding the social processes by which disenchantment became a, if not the, widely-held memory of the conflict, reaching acceptance in the War Books Boom that followed the dual successes of Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues, first serialized on the tenth anniversary of the armistice, and Sherriff's Journey's End, first performed the following month.