At the Violet Hour

At 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 newterms 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 violenceand 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 thirty years of the century, including the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, all of which play a vital role in defining the literary corpus; and the 1930s build-up to WWII, including the event that most enthralled Europe in these years, the SpanishCivil War. These historical upheavals provide the imaginative and physical material for a re-reading of four canonical writers (Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf), understood not only as including violence in their works, but as generating their primary styles and plots out of its deformations. Includedalso in this panorama are a host of other works, literary and non-literary, including visual culture, journalism, popular novels, and other modernist texts.

Cole's close readings of violence in the work of some of the major modernists are superb., 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., Cole's well-written, formidably researched book is a treasure trove of incisive readings that will surely become a classic ... Highly recommended.

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