Radio and English-Language Literature
Authors: Higashida Cheryl 
Published: October 2024

An integral part of modern life and symbol of modernity, radio resonates throughout 20th- and 21st-century literature. While radio emerges from and operates through a range of wireless technologies including telegraphy, telephony, and the internet, it is as a “one to many” broadcast medium—the first electronic mass medium—that radio has most profoundly impacted the literary imagination and literary production. Writers around the world have incorporated radio’s voices, sounds, technology, and techniques into poetry, plays, and novels. They have written for radio, read their own and others’ work over the airwaves, and hosted and produced broadcast programs. Listening to, participating in, and working on radio spurred writerly interests in heteroglossia, monoglossia, and ventriloquism; mass culture and audiences; the destabilization of temporal, spatial, and subjective boundaries; and the interrelationships of technology, the human body, and the modern sensorium. Even when working within national networks, writers deployed radio’s technology and techniques to challenge as well as affirm racial and imperial boundaries of nationhood, and to call into being local and transnational collectives united across space and time through mass-mediated listening. Radio interviews, readings, commentary, and adaptations have expanded and reconfigured literature’s presence in the world. In turn, literature and print have critically shaped broadcasting’s formats, ethos, and culture.

Radio and literature are thus intermedial forms that incorporate elements of each other as well as their broader media systems, mechanical and digital. The dynamic relationships among radio, literature, and other media can be understood in terms of remediation, the process by which media transpose and represent the content and properties of other media. Radio’s properties of liveness, immediacy, simultaneity, and intimacy are often perceived to be inherent to the medium. However, they are in fact engineered in response to historically and geographically specific social and political needs, pressures, and imaginations. In remediating radio’s properties, writers participate in the aesthetic and social production of radio’s effects, forms, practices, and relations.

Literary engagements with radio transmission began with early-20th-century avant-garde poets inspired by wireless telegraphy. With the inauguration of the first station broadcast in 1920, radio radiated through a wider range of literary genres and movements while spawning technologically mediated literary forms such as radio drama, the feature, and the talk. Poetry readings and radio drama emerged within the first years of commercial and public broadcasting. During radio’s so-called “golden age” from the late 1920s through the 1950s, literary modernism and realism flourished, competed, and resonated with the mass culture, apparatus, infrastructure, and institutions of radio. Writers attained especial prominence in radio broadcasting leading up to and during World War II when governments deployed writers’ craft and reputations in the service of propaganda aimed at their own citizens as well as international and colonial audiences. In the second half of the 20th century through to the present, poets, dramatists, and fiction and political writers have engaged with pirate, Black-oriented, alternative, internet, and other evolving forms of radio.