"Coming out of the dark": Late Modernism on the Radio

abstract: Broadcast radio sits between an aesthetic medium and a communications technology—it is a technology of dissemination with particular institutional arrangements and a medium with its own formal capabilities. Arguing that broadcast radio—as a vector of dissemination and as an aesthetic testing ground—was critical to the formation of a literary "late modernism" in midcentury Britain, the article suggests that the "radiogenic" aesthetic developed in Elizabeth Bowen, Louis MacNeice and Samuel Beckett's writing for BBC radio renegotiated literary modernism's engagement with the human in the wake of the historical and ethical transformations of World War II.