Greece on Air: Engagements with Ancient Greece on BBC Radio, 1920s-1960s.

摘要

This substantial and well-illustrated book is the first academic monograph to explore and interrogate in a sustained way the representation of classical antiquity in radio or, indeed, in any broadcast medium at all (a follow-up volume co-edited by Amanda Wrigley and Fiona Hobden, Ancient Greece on British Television, is in the works with Edinburgh University Press). It rests on dauntingly extensive original archival research (the appended "Production Chronology" is a treasury of previously unfamiliar finds) and is the logical step up from Wrigley's acclaimed edition, with Stephen Harrison, of Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plays (Oxford 2013). Wrigley is a well-connected expert in document-led approaches to radio broadcasting and BBC programming in particular; much of her research centers on drama, and how culturally "other" content was put across to historically recent mass audiences. Greece on Air casts (in part) back to her work on MacNeice, but goes much further in establishing a compelling overall picture of how Britain's favorite ancient civilization met its public in the twentieth century-and, thanks to a trove of correspondence, gives us an unprecedentedly clear sense of what that largely non-classically educated public made of its encounters with a foundational, yet thrillingly alien, long-ago past.