Overview

"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."

Full Product Details

Author:   Sarah Cole (Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.612kg
ISBN:  

9780199389063

ISBN 10:   0199389063
Pages:   400
Publication Date:   03 July 2014
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
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Table of Contents

Series Editors' Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction Violence and Form Power, Force, Political Violence Confronting War, Imagining History Chapters 1. Enchanted and Disenchanted Violence The Waste Land 2. Dynamic Violence: From Melodrama to Menace Imagining Revolutionaries and their Acts Explosion and Melodrama: The Secret Agents Dynamite and the Future 3. Cyclical Violence: The Irish Insurrection and the Limits of Enchantment The Long Past: Keening The Rising: Generative Violence The Years of War: Reprisal Past, Present, Future: Architectural Allegory 4. Patterns of Violence: Virginia Woolf in the 1930s Theorizing Violence in the 1930s The Spanish Civil War Action and Pacifism Virginia Woolf Early Patterns: The Voyage Out The 1920s: Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse Overwhelming Force: The Years, Three Guineas, Between the Acts Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index

Reviews

"""[A]nother virture of At the Violet Hour is that it enables us to see how unremitting and ceaseless was their struggle to wrest aesthetic consequence from virtually the same violence that each subsequent generation has had to fear as being meaningless."" --English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 ""Extraordinarily ambitious, beautifully written...An important, beautifully written book that forcefully confronts the toughest questions of modernist aesthetics. In doing so, it challenges us to rethink our sense of modernism's tenderness regarding the violence-subjected body--and modernism's potential to imagine new languages of peace."" --Modern Philology"

At the Violet Hour persuasively outlines the intellectual culture of violence over the long turn of the century and powerfully demonstrates the imaginative motives and aesthetic consequences of the modernist immersion in it. Sarah Cole reveals the complexities of this literary engagement through readings equally subtle and bold, and in doing so she opens rich and compelling understandings of the historicity of modernist art. --Vincent Sherry, author of 6IThe Great War and the Language of Modernism At the Violet Hour is a major contribution to modernist studies. It establishes the encounter with violence and bodily violation as the 'nerve center' of literary creation in a way that will make readers re-think the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century western canon. --Mark Hussey, editor of Virginia Woolf and War Attentive to the variety as well as the centrality of violence's apparitions in literary modernism, this is at once a meticulous history, a groundbreaking taxonomy, and a voyage of reading in which one is fortunate to have a fearlessly subtle critic for one's guide. It's also a very beautiful and moving book. Cole everywhere keeps faith with the care for form that, as she shows, governed modernism's taking of greatness with violence. --Douglas Mao, author of Fateful Beauty [A] magisterial study....Expansive, ambitious. --Woolf Studies Annual Cole's close readings of violence in the work of some of the major modernists are superb. --The Times Literary Supplement Cole's well-written, formidably researched book is a treasure trove of incisive readings that will surely become a classic...Highly recommended. --Choice [A] brilliant new study of modernism and violence. --English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920

[A]nother virture of At the Violet Hour is that it enables us to see how unremitting and ceaseless was their struggle to wrest aesthetic consequence from virtually the same violence that each subsequent generation has had to fear as being meaningless. --English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920

Author Information

Sarah Cole is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War.

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