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Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922-1938. Todd Avery. Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. vii + 158. $89.95 (cloth).
While the aural turn in modernist studies has been apparent for the last several years, with such pioneers as Garrett Stewart and Adelaide Morris foregrounding the sonic dimensions of textual production and the relation of the senses to mechanically reproduced sound, only recently has concerted scholarly investigation into the intersection of modernism and radio, in particular, begun to bear fruit. In last year's Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi, Timothy Campbell significantly extended past work on broadcasting's inscription in modernist text. Todd Avery's stimulating new book takes a different tack, focusing on writers' actual involvement with the BBC to add a valuable layer to our increasingly complex and nuanced picture of relations between modernism and mass culture.
Avery's particular interest is the use of the BBC as both vehicle and crucible for ethical discourse. Examining the broadcasts of Bloomsburyites, T. S. Eliot, and-somewhat surprisingly- H. G. Wells, he argues forcefully that modernist writers "heard in the vibrations of radio waves the sonic architecture of twentieth-century ethical thought" (31). To avail oneself of the unprecedented mass audience of the BBC, however, entailed inevitable negotiation with the institution's own moral agenda, as articulated by its sternly hieratic Director-General, John Reith. Avery usefully reiterates familiar arguments about the Arnoldian and evangelical bases for Reith's paternalistic conception of public service broadcasting as "a vehicle of national discipline" and cultural improvement (15). Following D. L. LeMahieu and media scholar Paddy Scannell, however, Avery argues that "radio was more unwieldy and less totalizable a technocultural phenomenon than the [BBC]...