'Gracefully written and unfailingly astute, attuned to the nuances of text, sound and institution, Writing the Radio War illuminates the complexly mediated construction of British nationhood during wartime, and in the process makes a compelling case for the vitality and durability of literary radio studies.' Debra Rae Cohen, University of South Carolina Wartime British writers took to the airwaves to reshape the nation and the Empire Writing the Radio War positions the Second World War as a critical moment in the history of cultural mediation in Britain. Through chapters focusing on the middlebrow radicalism of J. B. Priestley, ground-breaking works by Louis MacNeice and James Hanley at the BBC Features Department, frontline reporting by Denis Johnston, and the emergence of a West Indian literary identity in the broadcasts of Una Marson, Writing the Radio War explores how these writers capitalised on the particularities of the sonic medium to communicate their visions of wartime and postwar Britain and its empire. By combining literary aesthetics with the acoustics of space, accent and dialect, writers created aural communities that at times converged, and at times contended, with official wartime versions of Britain and Britishness. Ian Whittington is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi, where his research and teaching focus on twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature, media and culture. Cover image: BBC War Correspondent Robin Duff records an American serviceman's impressions of bomb damage near St Paul's Cathedral, London, in 1942. Copyright (c) BBC Photo Library Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-1359-6 Barcode

Ian Whittington is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939-1945 (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) as well as a number of essays on radio studies and twentieth-century British, Irish, and Anglophone literature.