Catching the Torch: Contemporary Canadian Literary Responses to World War I
222Catching the Torch: Contemporary Canadian Literary Responses to World War I
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Overview
In contrast to British and European remembrances of WWI, which tend to regard it as a cataclysmic destroyer of innocence, or Australian myths that promote an ideal of outsize masculinity, physical bravery, and white superiority, contemporary Canadian texts conjure up notions of distinctively Canadian values: tolerance of ethnic difference, the ability to do one's duty without complaint or arrogance, and the inclination to show moral as well as physical courage. Paradoxically, Canadians are shown to decry the horrors of war while making use of its productive cultural effects.
Through a close analysis of the way sacrifice, service, and the commemoration of war are represented in these literary works, Catching the Torch argues that iterations of a secure mythic notion of national identity, one that is articulated via the representation of straightforward civic and military participation, work to counter current anxieties about the stability of the nation-state, in particular anxieties about the failure of the ideal of a national "character."
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781771122382 |
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Publisher: | Wilfrid Laurier University Press |
Publication date: | 06/15/2018 |
Pages: | 222 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Excerpt from Catching the Torch: Contemporary Canadian Literary Responses to World War I by Neta Gordon
From the Introduction
Death So Noble, Vance argues that for postwar Canadians, the
Broken Ground critiques the failures of the Soldier Settlement Act, while Urquhart's The Stone Carvers and Cumyn's The Famished Lover both disparage the work of the Department of Soldiers' Civil Re-establishment in dealing with issues of veteran employment and pensions. Furthermore, the idea of "Western civilization" and a unified nation is interrogated, as works like Thiessen's Vimy and Boyden's Three Day Road consider the previously marginalized stories of francophone and First Nations participation, while Broken Ground, The Stone Carvers, and Unity (1918) explore the motley of immigrant communities on the home front who try to make meaning out of war. The idea that the war "had been a just one" is, in a certain way, countered with depictions of war activitywhether on the battlefield or in field hospitalsthat almost uniformly portray horror, chaos, and the agonizing loss of life. Finally, many worksmost explicitly Swan's The Deep and Poliquin's A Secret Between Usconfront the possibility that those who participated in the war may indeed be either forgotten or, at least, remembered in ways that have more to do with the needs of the living than the acts of the dead.
Broken Ground, The Deep, and A Secret Between Us, all of which suggest that narratives that depend on collective remembrance are doomed to recede in cultural importance, given enough time, because the collective will eventually choose to remember something else. Most of the works in this corpus might even be called optimistic in their intimations that the Canada that is born in the First World War is populated by those given to seeking love, healing, and a sense of hope and obligation toward community. Many of the narratives this volume examines rehabilitate the figure of the father and/or a conception of productive masculinity; many follow in the tradition of early-twentieth-century home front novels by women to consider the value of female work, in wartime and beyond; many explore productive ways to think about communicating across cultural and experiential divides; and most conclude with a look to the future (which is now the present) and a sense of promise that is decidedly free from irony. Thus, the remembrance of the First World War that has emerged in the past decade or so reflects a desire not to destroy the illusions Canadians have or have had about themselves, but rather to re-examine how those illusions about the war, with all its attendant horror and misery and loss, might offer a space for conceptions of the best Canadian self to emerge.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents forCatching the Torch: Contemporary Canadian Literary Responses to World War I by Neta Gordon
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Contemporary Canadian First World War Narratives: Remembering Canada's Best Self
Chapter One: The Dead Speak: Considering the Use of Prosopopoeia in Dancock's Dance, Mary's Wedding, and The Deep
Chapter Two: The War and Concepts of Nation in Jack Hodgins's Broken Ground and Frances Itani's Deafening
Chapter Three: Abandoning the Archivist: Commemorating the War Insider and Outsider in the World War One Novels of Alan Cumyn and Jane Urquhart
Chapter Four: Other Canadians: The Representation of Alternate Versions of the War in Vimy, Unity (1918), Three Day Road, and A Secret Between Us
Conclusion: Representations of the First World War and Wishing
Notes
Biblography
Index