Violence and the Glorification of Violence in the Literature of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The historical period between the outbreak of World War I and the collapse of socialism, including the bloody subsequent wars in the Balkans and in Eastern Europe, brought an estimated 187 million violent deaths, and “was without doubt the most murderous cen-tury of which we have record, both by the scale, frequency and length of the warfare which filled it, barely ceasing for a moment in the 1920s, but also by the unparalleled scale of the human catastrophes it produced, from the greatest famines in history to systematic genocide” (Hobsbawm, 1994:13). Twentieth-century literature has reacted to the violence of its age and in so doing it has both developed new forms and tech-niques and also taken recourse to traditional patterns of representation. Real-world vio-lence, from its massive physical reality to its most hidden symbolic manifestations, has always been dealt with in literature and has evolved its own specific genres and forms of representation, which remain relevant to the present day. In particular drama has devel-oped its own forms of violence, from the Greek myths centered around murder to medi-eval dramas of martyrdom and the Baroque “Haupt- and Staatsaktion” (sensationalist and gory theater of people in high places) to the modern theater of cruelty (see on this Redmond, 1991; Gould, 1991). In addition there is war narrative from every period, and the mass murder and Holocaust literature of our own time.