The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931-1968

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. Emily Bloom 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 Drawing upon unpublished radio archives, this book shows that radio broadcasting, rather than prompting a break with literary history and traditional literary forms, in fact served as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–the conjoining of revivalism and experimentation–create a distinctive radiogenic aesthetics in mid-century modernism.