Title: At the violet hour : modernism and violence in England and Ireland /
Authors: Cole, Sarah
Publisher: Oxford University Press,
Year: 2012
Subjects: English literature Irish authors History and criticism; Violence in literature.; English literature History and criticism; Modernism (Literature) Great Britain
Abstract: 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 offiction, 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.^
Contents: Enchanted and disenchanted violence -- Dynamite violence: from melodrama to menace -- Cyclical violence: the Irish Insurrection and the limits of enchantment -- Patterns of violence: Virginia Woolf in the 1930's.