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Initially created to counteract broadcasts from Nazi Germany, the BBC¿s Eastern Service became a cauldron of global modernism and an unlikely nexus of artistic exchange. Daniel Ryan Morse demonstrates the significance of the Eastern Service for global Anglophone literature and literary broadcasting.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: Finnegans Waves: James Joyce Between the BBC and 2RN
2: Reviewing Some Books: E. M. Forster as Blind Uncle
3: The End of Empire: Mulk Raj Anand’s Comparative Modernisms
4: Intimate and Kaleidosonic Styles: Attia Hosain, Venu Chitale, and the Hybrid Novel
Epilogue: The Eastern Service in the Era of Decolonization
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Daniel Ryan Morse is Fitzgerald Distinguished Professor of the Humanities and assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Summary
Initially created to counteract broadcasts from Nazi Germany, the BBC’s Eastern Service became a cauldron of global modernism and an unlikely nexus of artistic exchange. Directed at an educated Indian audience, its programming provided remarkable moments: Listeners in India heard James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake on the eve of independence, as well as the literary criticism of E. M. Forster and the works of Indian writers living in London.
In Radio Empire, Daniel Ryan Morse demonstrates the significance of the Eastern Service for global Anglophone literature and literary broadcasting. He traces how modernist writers used radio to experiment with form and introduce postcolonial literature to global audiences. While innovative authors consciously sought to incorporate radio’s formal features into the novel, literature also exerted a reciprocal and profound influence on twentieth-century broadcasting. Reading Joyce and Forster alongside Attia Hosain, Mulk Raj Anand, and Venu Chitale, Morse demonstrates how the need to appeal to listeners at the edges of the empire pushed the boundaries of literary work in London, inspired high-cultural broadcasting in England, and formed an invisible but influential global network.
Adding a transnational perspective to scholarship on radio modernism, Radio Empire demonstrates how the history of broadcasting outside of Western Europe offers a new understanding of the relationship between colonial center and periphery.
Additional text
This is an important book for students of Indian Anglophone literature but is also a useful contribution to the history of BBC Radio 3 and the role of the BBC’s external broadcasts.
