Description
Book SynopsisAt the Violet Hour argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often transformative. The book aims to excavate and amplify a consistent feature of this literature, which is that its central operations (formal as well as thematic) emerge specifically in reference to violence. At the Violet Hour offers a variety of new terms and paradigms for reading violence in literary works, most centrally the concepts it names enchanted and disenchanted violence. In addition to defining key aspects of literary violence in the period, including the notion of violet hour, the book explores three major historical episodes: dynamite violence and anarchism in the nineteenth century, which provided a vibrant, new consciousness about explosion, sensationalism, and the limits of political meaning in the act of violence; the turbulent events consuming Ireland in the first thir
Trade ReviewCole's close readings of violence in the work of some of the major modernists are superb. * Lauren Arrington, The Times Literary Supplement *
At the Violet Hour is also striking in terms of what it leaves out: a full-scale exploration of the Great War, arguably the defining event in the concatenation of modernism and violence. * Paul Sheehan, Review of English Studies *
Cole's well-written, formidably researched book is a treasure trove of incisive readings that will surely become a classic ... Highly recommended. * D. Stuber, CHOICE *
Table of ContentsIntroduction ; Chapter 1 ; Enchanted and Disenchanted Violence ; Chapter 2 ; Dynamite Violence: From Melodrama to Menace ; Chapter 3 ; Cyclical Violence: The Irish Insurrection and the Limits of Enchantment ; Chapter 4 ; Patterns of Violence: Virginia Woolf in the 1930s ; Conclusion ; Index
