The Wireless Past

Download or read book The Wireless Past written by Emily C. Bloom and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Wireless Past chronicles the emergence of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as a significant promotional platform and aesthetic influence for Irish modernism from the 1930s to the 1960s. This is the first book-length study of Irish literary broadcasting on the BBC and situates the works of W. B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Louis MacNeice, and Samuel Beckett in the context of the media environments that shaped their works. Drawing upon unpublished radio archives, this book shows that radio broadcasting, rather than prompting a break with literary history and traditional literary forms, in fact served as an important means for reinterpreting the legacies of oral and print traditions. In the years surrounding World War II, radio came to be seen as a catalyst for literary revivals and, simultaneously, a force for experimentation. This double valence of radio--conjoining revivalism and experimentation--creates mid-century modernism's radiogenic aesthetics"--