Radio Empire: The BBC's Eastern Service and the Emergence of the Global Anglophone Novel by Daniel Morse (review)

Abstract

804 Rather, chapters embed the reader in a particular “entanglement” and consider how literary (and film) form intersects with ideology, political action, publishing, religion, and science—among others (105). What energizes the collection is the “special urgency” Kohlmann and Taunton assign the period (2) as well as the “political urgencies” (58), “uncompromising urgency” (80), “revolutionary urgency” (81), “focused urgency” (159), “urgency of talk” (191), and “urgency of the postcolonial condition” (380) that individual contributors point out. This collective urgency calls to mind the “Tense Future” that Paul Saint-Amour sees in the 1920s and ’30s, but it also speaks to the urgency that A History of 1930s British Literature imparts to researchers today to think beyond conventional periodizations and theoretical turns and offer their own twist on their topic.2 Kohlmann and Taunton have assembled a thrilling collection of essays that provide diverse and distinct entry points into the long, wide, and urgent 1930s.