Book Review: Aasiya Lodhi and Amanda Wrigley, eds. Radio Modernisms: Features, Cultures and the BBC.

Authors

Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi

Abstract

This review addresses Radio Modernisms: Features, Cultures and the BBC (edited by Aasiya Lodhi and Amanda Wrigley), an essay collection which captures the entanglements of the feature—a radiogenic art form, popular at the mid-century BBC, that blended dramatic, documentary and musical attributes—with the currents of literary modernism that swirled around and through the BBC from the late 1920s until roughly the mid-1960s. While attending to the frequently experimental aspects of modernist radio features, this collection successfully frames the broadness of “modernism” as a mid-century aesthetic project by emphasizing the demotic and vernacular forms it took, and by stressing the connections between radio and other media forms in the period. The volume should be of great interest to scholars of radio, literary modernism, and mid-century British culture more generally.

Recommended Citation

Whittington, Ian, Book Review: Aasiya Lodhi and Amanda Wrigley, eds. Radio Modernisms: Features, Cultures and the BBC., RadioDoc Review, 7(1), 2021.