Death So Noble

Death So Noble

This book examines Canada’s collective memory of the First World War through the 1920s and 1930s beginning with the Armistice in 1918. This book deals with cultural history more than military history and looks at art, music and literature during World War I. Comparable to Modris Eskteins’ Rites of Spring and Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, the author draws on a broad range of sources, published and unpublished, making this book an original contribution to the growing literature dealing with World War I. Thematically organized into such subjects as the symbolism of the soldier, the implications of war memory for Canadian nationalism and the idea of a just war, the book draws on military records, memoirs, war memorials, newspaper reports, fiction, popular songs, and films. In each case Vance draws a distinction between the objective realities of the war and the way that contemporaries remember it. Death so Noble takes an unorthodox look at the Canadian war experience. It views the Great War as a cultural and philosophical force rather than as a political and military event. It will be of interest to specialists in First World War history and literature as well as a general audience.

The Vimy Trap

The story of the bloody 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge is, according to many of today’s tellings, a heroic founding moment for Canada. This noble, birth-of-a-nation narrative is regularly applied to the Great War in general. Yet this mythical tale is rather new. “Vimyism”— today’s official story of glorious, martial patriotism—contrasts sharply with the complex ways in which veterans, artists, clerics, and even politicians who had supported the war interpreted its meaning over the decades. Was the Great War a futile imperial debacle? A proud, nation-building milestone? Contending Great War memories have helped to shape how later wars were imagined. The Vimy Trap provides a powerful probe of commemoration cultures. This subtle, fast-paced work of public history—combining scholarly insight with sharp-eyed journalism, and based on primary sources and school textbooks, battlefield visits and war art—explains both how and why peace and war remain contested terrain in ever-changing landscapes of Canadian memory.

Tragedy of Coriolanus