Narrating Canadian War Memorials, Understanding National Identity
Narrating Canadian War Memorials, Understanding National Identity

Summary/Abstract: Pierre Berton writes that “Canada, more than most countries, is a nation of … memorials”. Yet, with the passage of time, war memorials inevitably tend to lose their original significance, becoming altogether ‘invisible’ for historically-estranged generations. Hence the need for re-remembering war memorials and monuments for the purposes of consolidating a (national) collective memory. The aim of this paper is a comparative analysis of Fields of Sacrifice (1963, dir. Donald Brittain), Herbert Fairlie Wood’s and John Swettenham’s Silent Witnesses (1974), Robert Shipley’s To Mark Our Place (1987), and Robert Konduras’s and Richard Parrish’s World War I: A Monumental History (2014) within the context of the theoretical distinction between memorial and monument cultures in order to discuss the defining ideological tropes of ‘Canadianness’.

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