“Nothing is older than the story of violence,” Sarah Cole's new book begins, and literature “has always offered an exemplary forum for making violence knowable, showing how it can be simultaneously the crucible for a culture's highest values (in war, especially) and a force radically to undermine those ideals” (3–4). But violence is always making it new, and in the modernist era especially, Cole argues, violence provided rich and ample resources for literary artists committed to the search for new aesthetic forms; in some ways, violence compelled this search. It may always have been with us, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries violence impressed itself on modern consciousness with spectacular, irresistible force. It did so most obviously and destructively in two world wars but also in waves of terrorist violence that swept across Western Europe at the fin de siècle, in the Irish wars, in the Spanish Civil War, and in patterns of sexual violence, repression, and hypocrisy endemic to the patriarchal cultures of Britain and Ireland. At the level of literary form as well as of theme, Cole suggests, the violence of modern history played a crucial part in shaping the modern “literary imaginary,” by forcing writers “to answer its challenges, to seek out new representational strategies, to find a conceptual register cued to its brutalities” (5). Violence “has its language,” Cole observes, but it also menaces language and literature itself, threatening to overwhelm even the most extraordinary imaginative resources and powers of expression, either by its excess or by its emptiness. Modernism, Cole argues, reshaped the literary landscape by discovering “intricate, often exquisite formal solutions to the challenges posed by violence” (5). The manner in which Cole develops her case, focusing intensely on key authors and texts while also pressing outward to larger questions of literary history, political context, and ethical implication, is itself intricate, often exquisite.

Modernism's encounter with violence is largely governed in Cole's account by the distinct yet frequently intertwined modes of what she calls enchantment and disenchantment, the terms of an invigorating aesthetic and political dialectic. The origins of these terms lie in Max Weber's notion of disenchantment, which referred to the secularization of a modern world ruled increasingly by industrial capitalism, materialism, and scientific rationalism. Cole proposes that Weberian disenchantment corresponds to the “emptiness and finality” of death, frequently registered in images of the ruined or disfigured material body. Thus disenchantment opposes and indeed actively resists the lure of enchantment, the aesthetic and cultural mode that testifies to the other side of our violence, its “magic” (39). By enchantment, Cole means the “tendency to see in violence some kind of transformative power,” which manifests itself in militarism, revolutionary political movements, and in aesthetic works that “imbue the violent experience with symbolic and cultural potency”; by disenchantment, she means the refusal of that tendency, “the active stripping away of idealizing principles, an insistence that the violated body is not a magic site for the production of culture” (42–43). And yet, as Cole reveals, modernism often makes it hard to disentangle a “disenchanted state of awe” induced by violence from an “enchanted desire to make that awe culturally productive” (44). In one signal instance, First World War poets, who “structure their works around a visceral disenchantment,” also “incorporate elements of enchantment into their verse” (63); “in making the dichotomy between sacralized violence and the ugly reality of war its central object,” Wilfred Owen's “Dulce et Decorum Est” “exults in its ability to make the language of enchantment do the seemingly contradictory work of exposing and rejecting violence” (64).

Cole presses this argument further in a virtuoso reading of The Waste Land, the source for her book's title. As we see in her account of the young man carbuncular episode, “the violet hour” signifies “a time of enchantment,” serving as “the ideal emblem for enchantment at its most enriching,” because it generates “an exceptionally sensitive kind of perception” (74–75). Moreover, Cole shows how Eliot's poem invites us to understand literature itself “as a self-conscious artifact produced out of and within a history of violence.” Fundamentally, Cole claims, The Waste Land “views literary history as a history of violence” (81), by which she means not simply a history of images of violence but “an almost infinite historicity in the cycle of violence, in which war was increasingly intertwined with global commerce, but also, for Eliot, with artistic payoff” (70). Rather than viewing it from some secure, aesthetically remote vantage, Cole argues, Eliot makes violence central to an imaginative process of strenuous self-scrutiny, engendering a “poetic of enchantment that at the same time ruthlessly disenchants its own origins” (81). With its sensitivity to the cyclical patterns of Eliot's verse, as well as to its fabled allusiveness (the discussion of Swinburne is a gem), this chapter offers a compelling reading of the poem while demonstrating just how useful the central notions of enchantment and disenchantment may be as terms of critical understanding.

Similarly engaging are the chapters on Conrad, James, and terrorist fictions and, at the end of the book, on Woolf and “patterns of violence” in the 1930s (197). If the enchantment/disenchantment scheme does not seem as fully applicable to Conrad—a master of Cole's disenchanted mode—as for other writers considered in this study, his significance for a modernist poetics of violence remains nonetheless palpable. The discussion of Woolf as a theorist of violence in the era of rising fascism and imminent war is stimulating and persuasive; in its attention to Woolf's treatment of the color purple and other signs of the bruised, violated human body, it isbrilliant. Cole's reading of Giles Oliver's gore-stained white canvas shoes in Between the Acts as “a blood painting” (199) is not only inspired in itself. It also provides an effective frame for the chapter's larger discussion of how violence, in Woolf's writing, “becomes shape, color, trace, or . . . pattern” (201): of how violence enables not merely Woolf's representations of violence per se but also, more importantly, her extended, self-scrutinizing reflection on the intimate relations between literature and death.

In some ways, the chapter on Yeats is even better. Situating Yeats, Synge, O'Casey, and other writers in relation to the Irish revolutionary movement of the early twentieth century, Cole finds four dominant paradigms governing literary representations of violence: enchantment, keening, reprisal, and architectural allegory. Each of these categories conforms broadly to a particular period within modern Irish history, although Cole is scrupulous in noting complications and crosscurrents. The result is some wonderful readings—of “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” for example, as an embodiment of architectural allegory; of “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” as a “poem of reprisal” (175); and of “Leda and the Swan” as a poem that seems “all at once . . . generative, allegorical, exultantly destructive, and full of the vengeful energy of reprisal” (194). The discussion of O'Casey is also gripping.

Highly attentive to the large complexities of Yeats's formal structures, as of Eliot's and Woolf's, Cole sometimes underestimates the more local, though hardly less consequential, complexities of his language. In “September 1913,” for example, Yeats may not intend us to consider the “delirium of the brave” from an entirely admiring, enchanted point of view—or not only from that point of view. The line “They weighed so lightly what they gave” may not mean simply that the Irish revolutionaries of the past should be revered for their “selflessness” (135), especially in light of the preceding two lines, which imagine an interlocutor crying, “Some woman's yellow hair / Has maddened every mother's son”: while humanizing Ireland's fallen heroes, and in particular the recently disgraced Parnell, these lines suggest that weighing lightly what you give may involve carelessness, or thoughtlessness, or at least distraction from political causes by a more common (and sometimes competing) source of enchantment, the “delirium” provoked by the beauty of another person. Or take “An Irish Airman Forsees His Death.” Does this poem offer an “admiring” portrait of Robert Gregory as a figure whose desire for “a lonely impulse of delight” represents, in Cole's reading, the “essence of a solitary ethos, valued in and of itself” (153)? Or may we not read the poem ironically, damningly even, as an indictment of a man who in choosing self-indulgent, self-destructive solipsism lets his nation down? Without fundamentally altering Cole's larger argument about Yeats's modernism, and about literary modernism's bracing encounters with violence in its various forms, more nuanced readings of such moments would further enrich an otherwise very rewarding chapter in a very rewarding book.