Literature has long sought to make sense of the destruction and
aggression wrought by human civilization. Yet no single literary
movement was more powerfully shaped by violence than modernism. As
Sarah Cole shows, modernism emerged as an imaginative response to
the devastating events that defined the period, including the chaos
of anarchist bombings, World War I, the Irish uprising, and the
Spanish Civil War. Combining historical detail with resourceful
readings of fiction, poetry, journalism, photographs, and other
cultural materials, At the Violet Hour explores the strange
intimacy between modernist aesthetics and violence in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The First World War and
T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land demonstrate the new theoretical
paradigm that Cole deploys throughout her study, what she calls
"enchanted" and "disenchanted" violence-the polarizing perceptions
of violent death as either the fuel for regeneration or the emblem
of grotesque loss. These concepts thread through the
literary-historical moments that form the core of her study,
beginning with anarchism and the advent of dynamite violence in
late Victorian England. As evinced in novels by Joseph Conrad,
Henry James, and others, anarchism fostered a vibrant, modern
consciousness of violence entrenched in sensationalism and
melodrama. A subsequent chapter offers four interpretive
categories-keening, generative violence, reprisal, and allegory-for
reading violence in works by W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Sean
O'Casey, and others around the time of Ireland's Easter Rising. The
book concludes with a discussion of Virginia Woolf's oeuvre,
placing the author in two primary relations to the encroaching
culture of violence: deeply exploring and formalizing its
registers; and veering away from her peers to construct an original
set of patterns to accommodate its visceral ubiquity in the years
leading up to the Second World War. A rich interdisciplinary study
that incorporates perspectives from history, anthropology, the
visual arts, and literature, At the Violet Hour provides a resonant
framework for refiguring the relationship between aesthetics and
violence that will extend far beyond the period traditionally
associated with literary modernism.
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