Audio Drama Modernism: The Missing Link between Descriptive Phonograph Sketches and Microphone Plays on the Radio

Tim Crook*, Mark Nicholas Grimshaw-Aagaard (Editor)

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Book/ReportBookResearchpeer-review

Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Number of pages339
ISBN (Print)978-981-15-8240-0
ISBN (Electronic)978-981-15-8241-7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020
SeriesPalgrave Studies in Sound
ISSN2633-5875

Bibliographical note

NB. Grimshaw-Aagaard is not the book's editor but the series editor (this system recognises no such thing . . .)

Keywords

  • BBC
  • Radio
  • radio drama
  • audio drama
  • modernism
  • phonograph drama
  • Lance Sieveking
  • Russell Hunting
  • Reginald Berkeley
  • Joan Littlewood
  • D.G. Bridson
  • Olive Shapley
  • podcasting

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