NDLI: A View of War and Soldiering in the Carey Novels of Ronald Welch

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Barnes, Clive
Copyright Year	2015
Abstract	Ronald Welch’s novels featuring the military adventures of the young men of the Carey family were first published between 1954 and 1976 and have recently been reissued. They were uniquely representative of historical military adventure for children in the Britain of this period; and were the last example of a vigorous century-old genre in respectable children’s publishing, particularly intended for boy readers, which honoured warrior virtues and regarded war as a crucible of male character. Children’s fiction since then has generally shied away from depicting soldiering. Where it has done it has focused mainly on the First World War and shown soldiers largely as victims. Welch’s work melds a model of heroic military adventure, inherited from the previous century, with a perception of the horrors of twentieth-century war derived from two world wars and his own experience of professional soldiering. While significantly amending the notion of war and soldiering as a heroic adventure, which he inherited from his predecessors, his work nevertheless retains the idea of combat as a character-forming male experience and implicitly offers military virtues as a model of manhood. While the attitudes expressed in his work were rejected by his publishers towards the end of his career, his views were perhaps an expression of more widely held beliefs at the time. And, for some of his original readers, the republication of his books is seen as a welcome re-affirmation of old values.
Starting Page	300
Ending Page	324
Page Count	25
File Format	PDF
ISSN	00456713
Journal	Children's Literature in Education
Volume Number	47
Issue Number	4
e-ISSN	15731693
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2015-12-24
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	War Military adventure Ronald Welch Children’s literature Historical fiction Soldiering Language and Literature Language Education Education Sociology
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Education Linguistics and Language Literature and Literary Theory

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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