Abstract
In recent years, the long-forgotten art of radio storytelling has experienced a bit of a comeback: in 2014, Sara Koenig’s award-winning podcast The Serial captured the imagination of millions of listeners who became hooked by the detective story. As Jeff Porter’s book reminds us, narrative radio has a long historical trajectory and forms an important, if often neglected, part of the medium’s early history. In his book, Porter takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the heyday of the genre in the 1930s and the 1940s United States while also taking note of its development in post-war British and Canadian radio broadcasting and its brief return to US radio in the 1970s. Each chapter commendably combines the analysis of commercial and institutional pressures with close readings of representative literary broadcasts, including pieces written by Orson Wells, Edward C. Murrow, Dylan Thomas and Samuel Beckett. Porter emphasizes the modernist aesthetics of early radio storytelling and its affinities with the preoccupations of literary modernism, such as absence, disembodiment and the mediation of subjectivity. One of the key themes emerging from Porter’s analysis is the productive tension between word and sound, amply exploited by modernist radio narrators to create an inventive, experimental form of broadcasting and challenge conventional modes of listening. This intriguing, amply researched analysis certainly brings a fine addition to the existing literature on radio history.