Erik Tonning

Matthew Feldman

David Addyman

This book is the first sustained examination of Samuel Beckett’s pivotal engagements with post-war BBC radio. The BBC acted as a key interpreter and promoter of Beckett’s work during this crucial period of his "getting known" in the Anglophone world in the 1950s and 1960s, especially through the culturally ambitious Third Programme, but also by the intermediary of the house magazine, The Listener. The BBC ensured a sizeable but also informed reception for Beckett’s radio plays and various “adaptations” (including his stage plays, prose, and even poetry); the audience that Beckett's works reached by radio almost certainly exceeded in size his readership or theatre audiences at the time. In rethinking several key aspects of his relationship with the BBC, a mix of new and familiar Beckett critics take as their starting point the previously neglected BBC radio archives held at the Written Archive Centre in Caversham, Berkshire. The results of this extended reassessment are timely and, in many cases, quite surprising—for readers of Beckett and for scholars of radio, “late modernism,” and post-war British culture more broadly.

A Reassessment

Samuel Beckett and BBC Radio

Henry Mead

The era of literary modernism coincided with a dramatic expansion of broadcast media throughout Europe, which challenged avant-garde writers with new modes of writing and provided them with a global audience for their work. Historicizing these developments and drawing on new sources for research Â? including the BBC archives and other important collections - Broadcasting in the Modernist Era explores the ways in which canonical writers engaged with the new media of radio and television. Considering the interlinked areas of broadcasting 'culture' and politics' in this period, the book engages the radio writing and broadcasts of such writers as Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, George Orwell, E. M. Forster, J. B. Priestley, Dorothy L. Sayers, David Jones and Jean-Paul Sartre. With chapters by leading international scholars, the volume's empirical-based approach aims to open up new avenues for understandings of radiogenic writing in the mass-media age.

Broadcasting in the Modernist Era

Frode Sandvik

The exhibition Art in Battle at KODE – Art Museums of Bergen portrays the battles over art initiated by Nazi policies for their European conquests. It examines propaganda exhibitions in occupied Norway as well as hitherto unseen art by soldiers stationed in Norway. This exceptional catalog documents this ground-breaking show and assembles leading experts on the history and ideology of Nazi cultural campaigns in both Germany and Norway to initiate a fresh discussion of the relationships between center and periphery within the art worlds of the Third Reich outside the overfamiliar dichotomy of “Degenerate“ versus “Great German“ art. Beyond historical re-assessment, this project also asks more pressingly: How do we encounter these battles over art today?

Art in Battle

Jolyon Mitchell

Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning

The Transformations of Tragedy explores different Christian influences, from the Early Modern to Modern periods, upon the development of post-classical Western tragedy.

Christian Influences from Early Modern to Modern

The Transformations of Tragedy

Samuel Beckett's Play, written 1962-63, was an aesthetic watershed inaugurating his late, 'abstract' dramatic style. This book gets close to Beckett's creative process by examining the possible influence of Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone music and Vassily Kandinsky's abstract painting upon this formal shift; by tracing Beckett's developing attitude to abstraction and its relation to his long-standing preoccupation with the 'breakdown' of the subject-object relation and the ultimate failure of all expression; and by following his formal choices through manuscript drafts. The author goes on to analyse Beckett's attempt to adapt his new methods to the media of film and television, and to demonstrate how Beckett's late works for stage and screen develop alongside one another right up to his 1985 adaptation of the play What Where for television. Throughout the book, unpublished manuscript materials such as Beckett's letters, drafts, notes on philosophy, psychology and art, and his 'German diaries' augment a detailed account of the submerged sources that Beckett appropriated to the evolving needs of his abstract dramatic art.

Erik Tonning

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