Read more
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.
List 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
About the author
Sarah Cole is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War.
Summary
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.
Additional text
[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.
