“The Experience Being My Own”: Identifying Life Writing in Plays by Canadian Veterans of the Great War

This article explores the problem of theatrical playtexts that disguise the operations of life writing in conventionalized dramatic genres by identifying life writing in three plays written by returned soldiers in Canada in the years following the First World War. The essay asks how we might identify life writing in theater if auto/biography is neither overtly claimed nor foregrounded in content or performance and identifies a historical moment when the autobiographical compulsion was hidden behind the scrim of genre convention prior to the legitimization of autobiographical drama in the modern theater.