[audiobook] Marathon: The Middle Keys (Images of America) by Laura Albritton; Jerry Wilkinson at Arts-Photography

Description

The Oxford Mid-Century Studies series publishes monographs in several disciplinary and creative areas in order to create a thick description of culture in the thirty-year period around the Second World War. With a focus on the 1930s through the 1960s; the series concentrates on fiction; poetry; film; photography; theatre; as well as art; architecture; design; and other media. The mid-century is an age of shifting groups and movements; from existentialism throughabstract expressionism to confessional; serial; electronic; and pop art styles. The series charts such intellectual movements; even as it aids and abets the very best scholarly thinking about the power of art in a world under new techno-political compulsions; whether nuclear-apocalyptic; ColdWar-propagandized; transnational; neo-imperial; super-powered; or postcolonial.The Wireless Past chronicles the emergence of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as a significant promotional platform and aesthetic influence for Irish modernism from the 1930s to the 1960s. This is the first book-length study of Irish literary broadcasting on the BBC and situates the works of W. B. Yeats; Elizabeth Bowen; Louis MacNeice; and Samuel Beckett in the context of the media environments that shaped their works. Drawing upon unpublished radio archives; this bookshows that radio broadcasting; rather than prompting a break with literary history and traditional literary forms; in fact served as an important means for reinterpreting the legacies of oral and print traditions. In the years surrounding World War II; radio came to be seen as a catalyst for literary revivalsand; simultaneously; a force for experimentation. This double valence of radiomdash;the conjoining of revivalism and experimentationmdash;create a distinctive radiogenic aesthetics in mid-century modernism.