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

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.

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