The Modernist “Microphone Play”: Listening in the Dark to the BBC

This essay surveys BBC radio drama from the 1920s to the 1940s to show how these plays exhibit many traits we commonly associate with modernist literature. Because radio drama appealed to the ear alone and often used multiple studios, mixing narrative, music, and sound effects, it embraced certain modernist formal devices such as stream of consciousness, fragmentation, linguistic experimentation, as well as mythic paradigms. While drama is often under-represented in surveys of modernist literature, I argue that radio drama can help to fill this void.