Greece on Air: Engagements with Ancient Greece on BBC Radio, 1920s-1960s(Classical Presences)

Greece on Air offers the first substantial discussion of the fascinating history of creative and public engagements with ancient Greek literature, history, and thought via the BBC Radio, from the birth of domestic broadcasting in the 1920s up to the 1960s. The astonishing range of programmes broadcast in this period includes some of the most interesting, creative, and political engagements with ideas from and about ancient Greece in twentieth-century Britain. From talks to schools and adult education groups, creative re-imaginings of ancient historical texts written and broadcast as Second World War propaganda, and scores of performances of Greek tragedy, comedy, and their modern adaptations, Wrigley draws on the vast amount of evidence that exists in the written archives (both for production processes and also listeners' responses) to develop a full understanding of the role of the radio medium in public engagements with ancient Greece in twentieth-century Britain.

Table of Contents:
List of illustrations List of abbreviations Note on conventions Part One Introduction. Broad(-er)casting ancient Greece 1: Mass media and classics, the public and cultural elitism 2: The contexts of programme-making 3: Listening in Part Two 4: Gilbert Murray: 'radio Hellenist', 1925-1956 5: Greek history in the wartime propaganda of Louis MacNeice 6: The poetry and drama of Homeric epic, 1943-1969 7: Greek tragedy: the case of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, 1946-1976 8: Post-war Greek comedy Conclusion. Public property; or, classics for all Appendix. Production chronology Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Amanda Wrigley (Research Fellow, University of Westminster) is a cultural historian who works on a broad range of topics, including ancient Greece in 20th-century British culture; radio and television programmes which adapt and create dramatic and literary forms; and mass media in formal and informal educational contexts. She is author of Performing Greek Drama in Oxford (2011), Greece on Air: Engagements with Ancient Greece on BBC Radio, 1920s-1960s (2015) and Greece on Screen: Greek Plays on British Television (forthcoming). She studied Classics as an undergraduate at Leeds and wrote her PhD thesis in the Department of Classical Studies at The Open University. She held posts in the Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford (2001-09) and the Classics Department, Northwestern University (2009-10) before moving to the University of Westminster in 2011. She is Associate Editor of The Radio Journal. For further information, see https://amandawrigley.wordpress.com.

Review :
Greece on Air extensively documents just how formidable Greece's presence on British radio used to be ... a compelling account of the diversity in these decades of public participation in ancient Greece's radio life -- and beyond. Greece on Air excels in its ability to guide readers through, and weave a compelling story from, the maddeningly complex and frustratingly lacunose; it does great service in opening up a previously all-but-unexplored field of reception of the ancient world in modern mass culture ... Wrigley writes elegantly and with unfailing clarity, delivering a deservedly upbeat story. Amanda Wrigley's Greece on Air fills a gap in the historical field of Classics with a book which covers almost the entirety of BBC Radio's engagement with Ancient Greece and Rome in the twentieth century. She has provided an extremely thorough overview for her readers ... she has created a situation which, as well as informing the general populace in and of itself, nudges them towards discovering and learning new information for themselves. a genuinely groundbreaking study, achieving the not small task of opening up a new realm of research. In Greece on Air, Wrigley offers us the most comprehensive treatment to date of the ways in which radio drama has responded to, transmitted, and transformed the legacy of the classical world ... a fascinating and worthwhile monograph