Thomas Hodd is an Associate Professor of English at Université de Moncton. His recent publications include Mary Melville, the Psychic: A Critical Edition (2019) as well as an article on English-language women poets for Parallel Universe: the Poetries of New Brunswick (2018). He is also editor of A Soldier’s Place: the War Stories of Will R. Bird (2018).
Article
“A Casualty of Genre: The War Short Stories of Will R. Bird”
Abstract
With the recent re-issuing of works by Canadian war writer, Will R. Bird, scholars are being invited to reconsider his contribution to Canadian war literature of the inter-war period. Although chiefly known for his soldier-memoir, And We Go On (1930), Bird also knew considerable success as a writer of war short stories. Building on Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the short story as a “fragment or excerpt of a life,” as well as the genre’s displacement of time in favour of other narratological considerations, this introductory essay to Bird’s war short story corpus examines a handful of representative stories in order to illustrate how he privileged the humanity and brotherhood of soldiers over their combat deeds. As a result, Bird’s short stories functioned as a form aesthetic therapeutics for the thousands of veteran readers who not only identified with the situations he described, but also with the emotional and psychological turmoil of his soldier protagonists.
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