Citation

Cole S. Modmod 2009; 16(2): 301-328.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Johns Hopkins University Press,)

DOI

10.1353/mod.0.0074

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The explosion of bombs is an inescapable feature of the contemporary world. Marked by suicide attacks around the globe, and in the aftermath of a century which turned the bombing of civilians into the norm for warfare, our era seems unthinkable without such destruction. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, dynamite explosion represented an entirely new form of violence, as Alfred Nobel's invention of 1866 helped to sweep the world into its modern shape. From the moment of its inception, dynamite violence became an immediate and ever-escalating sensation, with its stunning ability not only to kill and maim, but within seconds to level an entire landscape. The violence of dynamite reverberated in every sensory register as something novel (hence sensational in that way, too), from its chemical smell, to its shattering sound, to its extreme tactile effects, and it held pronounced political associations, quickly becoming associated with terrorism. It shattered, exploded, ripped, and tore; it created its own palpable and recognizable form of wreckage; and its employment for radical causes suggested a future with unknowable and potentially frightful contours. In sum, dynamite violence added a potent new element to the modern imaginary. Its literary and cultural legacy in England in the last decades of the century, and into the modernist period, is the subject of this essay.