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Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio, and Modern Life, 1914-1945 arguesthat trench warfare created new practices of listening to nature in order to cultivate an intimate connection with its vibrations to understand danger and to imagine survival. In focusing on the sensing of sounds and rhythms, this study demonstrates how nature retained its emotional potency as the pace of life seemed to increase and new man-made sounds and sonic media appeared all around.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1. Birdsong over the trenches: the sound of survival and escape
- 'The air is loud with death' - listening in fear for danger
- Sonic relief amid the shelling
- Regenerative rhythms
- Resilience and 'carrying on' in birds and men
- Skyward escape with the lark
- Conclusion
- 2. Pastoral quietude for shell shock and national recovery
- Quiet for the wounded?
- Country house therapy
- The 'beneficent alluring quietude' of the Village Centre utopia
- Quiet for national recovery
- Conclusion
- 3. Broadcasting nature
- John Reith's public service nightingale
- In touch with cosmic harmony
- Normalising radio with nature
- Conclusion
- 4. The rambler's search for the sensuous
- Re-balancing the senses
- Willis Marshall: into the moors
- Nan Shepherd's merger with the mountain
- A violent assertion of personality: hedonism in nature
- Conclusion
- 5. Modern birdsong and civilisation at war
- Recording and modernising birdsong
- Home front listening tensions
- 'Consoling voices of the air': Ludwig Koch's broadcasts
- Birdsong civilised and civilising
- Conclusion
- Afterword
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Bibliography and sources
- Index
About the author
Michael Guida is a cultural historian and a Research Associate in Media & Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex.
His research concentrates on avian-human relations in modern urban Britain and recent published work has examined cultures of birdkeeping (in The Working Class at Home, 1770-1940, Palgrave) and birdsong and emotions (in The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History).
Summary
Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio, and Modern Life, 1914-1945 reveals for the first time how the sounds and rhythms of the natural world were listened to, interpreted and used amid the pressures of early twentieth century life. The book argues that despite and sometimes because of the chaos of wartime and the struggle to recover, nature's voices were drawn close to provide security and engender optimism. Nature's sonic presences were not obliterated by machine age noise, the advent of radio broadcasting or the rush of the urban everyday, rather they came to complement and provide alternatives to modern modes of living.
This book examines how trench warfare demanded the creation of new listening cultures to understand danger and to imagine survival. It tells of the therapeutic communities who made use of nature's quietude and the rhythms of rural work to restore shell-shocked soldiers, and of ramblers who sought to immerse themselves in the sensualities of the outdoors. It reveals how home-front listening during the Blitz was punctuated by birdsong, broadcast by the BBC. To listen to nature during this period was to cultivate an intimate connection with its energies and to sense an enduring order and beauty that could be taken into the future. Listening to nature was a way of being modern.
Additional text
Listening to British Nature, the cultural and social historian Michael Guida looks at the interconnected relationship of nature and modern life by focusing on evolving listening practices in the first half of the twentieth century.
