The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 by Emily C. Bloom

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 by Emily C. Bloom Eileen Morgan-Zayachek The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968, by Emily C. Bloom , pp. 205. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. $80.00. Emily Bloom's The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 analyzes the work of four Anglo-Irish writers—W. B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett—who independently contributed to the British Broadcasting Corporation in the mid-twentieth century. The four authors central [End Page 156] to her study were but a few of the writers from Ireland who gravitated toward radio and specifically the BBC during the era of World War II. Bloom finds in their adaptations and original writings for radio a complex set of negotiations that transform our understanding of radio's impact on both literature and on literary modernism. Indeed, The Wireless Past is a highly intentional effort to improve on previous scholarship and reorient critical inquiry. Bloom's analysis proceeds from the recognition that scholarly approaches to radio broadcasting and modernism have remained a "fringe pursuit" by radio enthusiasts rather than a subfield of modernism studies, largely because questions about radio writers' identities and about the intertextuality between forms—literature and radio especially—have not been sufficiently engaged. The Wireless Past similarly seeks to correct a perceived overreliance on methods of analysis derived for use on printed literature, such as close reading, that do not apply well to sound broadcasting. Critical treatments of Irish writers' broadcasting contributions have also impeded understanding—specifically of the crosscultural and transnational implications of literary broadcasting—by focusing almost exclusively on the Irish contexts for developments in broadcasting. Bloom offers a means of getting beyond these critical shortcomings, modeling critical practices that duly examine how Anglo-Irish writers used radio broadcasting to engage and adapt literary forms and traditions, and transcend the boundaries of national culture. Bloom demonstrates how through their broadcasting projects they furthered a type of modernism she dubs "radio modernism" which had its own, distinctive "radiogenic" aesthetic that was defined by their simultaneous impulse toward revivalism and innovation. The writers central to The Wireless Past have not typically been studied as a group, owing to the differences in their aesthetics and careers. For Bloom, they serve as exemplars of radio modernism. They understood the instability of national identity through their own lived experiences: the "homelessness" and "displacement" they experienced in the decades after Irish independence and surrounding the World War II—combined with their shared interest in imagining transnational audiences for their work—made them, according to Bloom, uniquely qualified to perform modernist radio experiments at the BBC. As a foundation for The Wireless Past, the twin assumptions that these Anglo-Irish writers experienced the same displacement, a displacement that yielded the understanding of identity as being "essentially unstable" seems to partake in a form of essentialism that requires, at the very least, the social and historical contextualization that Bloom advocates and practices. She does not probe this starting point, but she does acknowledge how some readers may accuse The Wireless Past of reproducing hegemonic structures in reading Irish literature in the context of the British Broadcasting service. She also appropriately recognizes that access to [End Page 157] broadcasting opportunities at the BBC were not uniformly distributed among Irish writers: the privileged Anglo-Irish minority generally had greater access to BBC jobs than other Irish writers, and some of the Anglo-Irish played gatekeeping roles at times. The principal concern and main achievement of The Wireless Past is to show how these writers made radio a generative space at midcentury. Rather than succumb to the widespread anxiety among writers that radio would diminish or even extinguish the public's interest in literature (which Bloom explores thoroughly in the chapter "Elizabeth Bowen's Spectral Radio"), these writers tested the new media's capacity to engage and revise literary texts and forms. In this way their work demonstrates how electronic spaces were opening up to writers and enabling the possibility of new relationships with the literary past. Bloom succeeds in showing how their "radiogenic" aesthetics were never intended as...