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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. 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.
— Susheila Nasta, coeditor of The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
With archival surprises and deft close readings, Radio Empire shows how the BBC’s Eastern Service influenced the development of Anglophone fiction. Including treatments of canonical figures such as E. M. Forster and Mulk Raj Anand, as well as important but understudied novelists, such as Venu Chitale and Attia Hosain, Morse reveals how the technical constraints and possibilities of radio broadcasting impacted the formal conventions of English-language writing. It is an exciting contribution to colonial and postcolonial literary studies.
— Peter J. Kalliney, author of Modernism in a Global Context
With his searching examination of the role of the BBC's Eastern Service in the development of the global Anglophone novel, Daniel Ryan Morse fills an important gap in literary radio studies. Wedding the insights of postcolonial studies and media theory, Radio Empire capably establishes the salience of transnational and intermedial exchange to the literary history of the mid-twentieth century.
— Debra Rae Cohen, coeditor of Broadcasting Modernism
Radio Empire makes a substantial contribution to both radio studies and study of literary modernism . . . Morse provides deeply researched readings that change one's understanding not only of individual texts but also of the shape and scope of literary and media histories. Morse navigates multiple social contexts to make sometimes surprising and always convincing remarks about how politically progressive these literary and radio texts turn out to be . . . Essential.
Radio Empire pushes against the siloed ways in which literary modernism is often studied, with writers from the Global North and those of South Asian heritage assessed separately. Here, conceptually and methodologically, Morse’s approach is fresh and ambitious . . . [this book] reveals the profound nature of the impact the BBC Eastern Service had upon the printed and broadcast word, and how intertwined the relationship between the two was.
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.
An excellent historical account of an understudied part of the BBC . . . [This book] will undoubtedly be a great tool for any scholar working on broadcasting history, postcolonial studies, and post-war literary history.
Radio Empire is an important work of scholarship, offering a considered analysis of the relationship between radio and literature in the war and post-war years.
Morse’s compelling account of the intermedial relationship between radio and the novel in the mid-twentieth century is a valuable contribution to scholarship of literary radio, modernism, and postcolonial studies.
A welcome archival counterpart to works by Eric Hayot, Pheng Cheah, and Emily Apter.
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