Listening in: broadcasts, speeches, and interviews by Elizabeth Bowen

The novelist Elizabeth Bowen believed that media was a personal and social force. From the 1940s to the 1960s, she took an active role in the media and radio in particular by writing essays for radio broadcast, improvising interviewson the air and giving public lectures. Despite her pronounced stammer and hercomplaints that reading her own work gave her lockjaw, she was a spellbindingtalker. Bowen became known as a public intellectual capable of talking on numerous subjects with general wit and insight. Invited to university campuses inthe UK and US, she delivered important lectures on language, the ‘fear of pleasure’, character in fiction, the idea of American homes and other topics. Herfirst efforts for radio were adaptations of her own short stories and dramatizations of literary subjects. She quickly turned to commentary on culture, such as the beginning of the BBC Third Programme and the atmosphere in postwar Czechoslovakia. She documented her love of cinema in the 1930s and the making ofLawrence of Arabia in the 1960s, and broadcast on Queen Elizabeth II, Katherine Mansfield, Frances Burney and Jane Austen. During her lifetime, Bowen published few of her broadcasts. Listening In brings together a substantial number of her ungathered and unknown works for the first time.

• ISBN: 978-0-7486-4042-3
• Editorial: Edinburgh University
• Encuadernacion: Rústica
• Páginas: 352
• Fecha Publicación: 01/05/2010
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés