"A very solid and comprehensive collection of essays that allows readers to witness more concretely the variety of forms that the dialogue between literature and the radio has taken in the last century. An outstanding book."--Jean-Michel Rabate, author of Jacques Lacan and Literature "This book is a real gift: its variety of essays in different voices provides an opportunity to get up to speed with the sometimes suprising ways that radio helped to structure modernism, served as a foil for modernist writers and artists, and forced the modernists into a more constructive engagement with issues of elite and popular culture. A lively collection."--Kevin J.H. Dettmar, author of Is Rock Dead? It has long been accepted that film helped shape the modernist novel and that modernist poetry would be inconceivable without the typewriter. Yet radio, a key influence on modernist literature, remains the invisible medium. The contributors to Broadcasting Modernism argue that radio led to changes in textual and generic forms. Modernist authors embraced the emerging medium, creating texts that were to be heard but not read, incorporating the device into their stories, and using it to publicize their work. They saw in radio the same spirit of experimentation that animated modernism itself. Because early broadcasts were rarely recorded, radio's influence on literary modernism often seems equally ephemeral in the historical record. Broadcasting Modernism helps fill this void, providing a new perspective for modernist studies even as it reconfigures the landscape of the era itself.

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.

Radio Modernism marries the fields of radio studies and modernist cultural historiography to the recent 'ethical turn' in literary and cultural studies to examine how representative British writers negotiated the moral imperative for public service broadcasting that was crafted, embraced, and implemented by the BBC's founders and early administrators. Weaving together the institutional history of the BBC and developments in ethical philosophy as mediated and forged by writers such as T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf, Todd Avery shows how these and other prominent authors' involvement with radio helped to shape the ethical contours of literary modernism. In so doing, Avery demonstrates the central role radio played in the early dissemination of modernist art and literature, and also challenges the conventional assertion that modernists were generally elitist and anti-democratic. Intended for readers interested in the fields of media and cultural studies and modernist historiography, this book is remarkable in recapturing for a twenty-first-century audience the interest, fascination, excitement, and often consternation that British radio induced in its literary listeners following its inception in 1922.

Weaving together the BBC's institutional history and developments in ethical philosophy, Todd Avery shows how the involvement of writers like T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf with radio helped to shape the ethical contours of literary modernism. His book recaptures for a twenty-first-century audience the interest, fascination, excitement, and often consternation that British radio induced in its literary listeners following its inception in 1922.

The Cambridge History of American Modernism examines one of the most innovative periods of American literary history. It offers a comprehensive account of the forms, genres, and media that characterized US modernism: coverage ranges from the traditional, such as short stories, novels, and poetry, to the new media that shaped the period's literary culture, such as jazz, cinema, the skyscraper, and radio. This volume charts how recent methodologies such as ecocriticism, geomodernism, and print culture studies have refashioned understandings of the field, and attends to the contestations and inequities of race, sovereignty, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity that shaped the period and its cultural production. It also explores the geographies and communities wherein US modernism flourished-from its distinctive regions to its metropolitan cities, from its hemispheric connections to the salons and political groupings that hosted new cultural collaborations.

Audio Drama and Modernism traces the development of political and modernist sound drama during the first 40 years of the 20th Century. It demonstrates how pioneers in the phonograph age made significant, innovative contributions to sound fiction before, during, and after the Great War. In stunning detail, Tim Crook examines prominent British modernist radio writers and auteurs, revealing how they negotiated their agitational contemporaneity against the forces of Institutional containment and dramatic censorship. The book tells the story of key figures such as Russell Hunting, who after being jailed for making ‘sound pornography’ in the USA, travelled to Britain to pioneer sound comedy and montage in the pre-Radio age; Reginald Berkeley who wrote the first full-length anti-war play for the BBC in 1925; and D.G. Bridson, Olive Shapley and Joan Littlewood who all struggled to give a Marxist voice to the working classes on British radio.

Popular Modernism and Its Legacies reconfigures modernist studies to investigate how modernist concepts, figures, and aesthetics continue to play essential--though often undetected--roles across an array of contemporary works, genres, and mediums. Featuring both established and emerging scholars, each of the book's three sections offers a distinct perspective on popular modernism. The first section considers popular modernism in periods historically associated with the movement, discovering hidden connections between traditional forms of modernist literature and popular culture. The second section traces modernist genealogies from the past to the contemporary era, ultimately revealing that immensely popular contemporary works, artists, and genres continue to engage and thereby renew modernist aesthetics and values. The final section moves into the 21st century, discovering how popular works invoke modernist techniques, texts, and artists to explore social and existential quandaries in the contemporary world. Concluding with an afterword from noted scholar Faye Hammill, Popular Modernism and Its Legacies reshapes the study of modernism and provides new perspectives on important works at the center of our cultural imagination.