English

If there is a downside to the emergence as a field of what one might call modernist radio studies, it's that for the most part its focus and terms of reference still reflect the English departments from which it sprang. While early scholarship that tended, in its reclamation of modernist radio presence, to concentrate on documenting readings, scripts, and broadcasts by literary modernists has been augmented by work more attentive to the lessons of media studies, discussions of the spoken word continue-unsurprisingly-to dominate. Yet this word-centeredness drastically distorts our map of the period's soundscape: on the BBC in the 1930s, for example, spoken word broadcasts (even including schools programs) rarely totaled more than thirty percent of programming; music of various kinds always constituted the vast majority of broadcasting.

Through/Behind the WindowIt's one of the most iconic images of the Great War: two women support each other as they stare out a window, a child beside them, clinging. Outside, rolling hills, lushly green, and the end of a uniformed troop of soldiers, marching out of the frame: the caption is "Women of Britain Say- 'GO!'" Created by the artist E. V. Kealey for the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee in 1915, the poster spawned imitations during the war itself, and has since become one of the most frequently cited visual texts in academic disputes about the significance and effect of Great War propaganda (Figure 1).Yet whether we deem such posters, as in Jay Winter's view, part of a "grammar of consent" that reflected "an existing and powerful consensus" (38,42), or see them as "rhetorics of shame and coercion" (Albrinck 323), we cannot help but acknowledge the way in which viewers are implicated in the poster's perspective. As...