Writing the radio war: British literature and the politics of broadcasting, 1939-1945
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The social and political transformations of the Second World War in Britain required a massive coordination of public opinion and effort. "Writing the Radio War: British Literature and the Politics of Broadcasting, 1939-1945" examines the mobilization of British writers through their involvement in radio broadcasting. Drawing on theories of mass communication from the 1930s to the present day, this dissertation argues that the power of radio as a medium of propaganda and national identity-formation lay in its ability to generate an aura of intimacy that encouraged listener identification with the national community. Capitalizing on this intimacy, writers imagined listening publics that were at odds with official projects of national unity. Confronted with the Anglophone fascism of pro-Nazi broadcaster William Joyce, Nancy Mitford and Rebecca West used their writings to neutralize the threat of autochthonous extremism by depicting Joyce as a laughable ideological non-national subject. Even among patriotic Britons, political fractures appeared, as when J.B. Priestley used his radio "Postscripts" to frame debates about postwar British society along socialist lines. In the mixed documentary-dramatic genre of the radio "feature," Louis MacNeice modelled collective gain through collaborative effort in The Stones Cry Out, Alexander Nevsky, and Christopher Columbus. On the Overseas Service, George Orwell and E.M. Forster attempted subtle compromises to keep Indian listeners loyal to the Empire, while Jamaican poet Una Marson repurposed the BBC's networks in order to imagine alternative communities. Marson turned the program Calling the West Indies into an incubator for a vibrant Caribbean literary scene. Collectively, these writers used the wireless to guide British listeners through the social and political changes brought on by the war: having entered the conflict as an imperial nation riven by class and ideology, Britain emerged ready to embark on the massive social experiment of the multicultural postwar welfare state with a renewed sense of possibility and promise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".