Broadcasting in the Modernist Era

Description

The era of literary modernism coincided with a dramatic expansion of broadcast media throughout Europe, which challenged avant-garde writers with new modes of writing and provided them with a global audience for their work. Historicizing these developments and drawing on new sources for research - including the BBC archives and other important collections - Broadcasting in the Modernist Era explores the ways in which canonical writers engaged with the new media of radio and television. Considering the interlinked areas of broadcasting 'culture' and politics' in this period, the book engages the radio writing and broadcasts of such writers as Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, George Orwell, E. M. Forster, J. B. Priestley, Dorothy L. Sayers, David Jones and Jean-Paul Sartre. With chapters by leading international scholars, the volume's empirical-based approach aims to open up new avenues for understandings of radiogenic writing in the mass-media age.

Matthew Feldman is Reader in contemporary history at Teesside University, UK. Henry Mead is a Research Associate at Teesside University, UK, and Bergen University, Norway. Erik Tonning is Research Director of the Modernism and Christianity project at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is co-editor of the Modernist Archives series and the Historicizing Modernism series, both published by Bloomsbury.

[An] excellent and wide-ranging collection... Broadcasting in the Modernist Era is essential reading. * The Times Literary Supplement * The volume's strands of enquiry will be appreciated and enriched by scholars of inter-medial cultural history for years to come -- Keith Williams, University of Dundee, UK * Review of English Studies * This edited collection addresses an issue that has been relatively neglected: how radio participated in the development of modernism during the early 20th century. ... [The book] make[s] for an important advance in the historiography of broadcasting * European Journal of Communication * This collection provides a look back at an important aspect of modernism: the implications of broadcast media, a subject also of interest in the contemporary digital age...Not surprisingly, the concerns of many of the modernists discussed-Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, Forster, Woolf, Orwell, et al.-parallel concerns that have arisen since the introduction of the World Wide Web. The variety of modernist responses, both reservations and enthusiasms, and their contemporary resonances make it clear that careful examinations, such as the ones gathered here, provide lessons by showing how previous generations and intellectual movements dealt with "new media" of their times...Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -- A. J. Barlow, New York City College of Technology (CUNY) * CHOICE *