All Else Is Folly

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Peregrine Acland. All Else Is Folly

CONTENTS

Introduction

a note on the text

author’s note

Appendix

OTHER VOYAGEUR CLASSICS TITLES

Copyright

Отрывок из книги

The Dundurn Group presents the Voyageur Classics series, building on the tradition of exploration and rediscovery and bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties.

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For one brief season, it was read widely, appearing in multiple editions throughout the English-speaking world, and then the novel faded from view. Might it be that All Else is Folly fell victim to the more dominant narrative of the war, written by the likes of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen, and perpetuated by literary critics like Paul Fussell, where the more desolate, the more grim, the better, at least in literary circles? Or is the cause of neglect found in our very own soil? More than any other in Canada’s history, the First World War is held aloft as the event in which nationhood began to take root. How then is it that all novels written by Canadian veterans of the conflict quickly fell out of print? How is it that only one, Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed, returned and remained consistently in print? How is it that Canadian students read All Quiet on the Western Front while the Great War novels of veterans Peregrine Acland, Philip Child, W. Redvers Dent, and Will Bird are unrecognized?

A scandal, indeed. It is hoped that this edition, the first in more than eight decades, will at long last bring this most central of Canada’s war novels back to prominence.

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