AL Newsflash!
Amanda Wrigley, Associate Lecturer in Region 2 has co-edited the book: Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plays (Classical Presences series, OUP 2013). Edited by Amanda Wrigley and Stephen Harrison Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plays presents eleven radio scripts written and produced by the poet and writer Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) over the span of his twenty-year career at the BBC, during which he wrote and produced well over a hundred radio scripts on an impressively wide variety of subjects. This volume's selection of scripts, all but one of which is published for the first time, illustrates the various ways that MacNeice re-worked one particular and recurrent source of material for radio broadcast - ancient Greek and Roman history and literature. The volume thus seeks to explore MacNeice's literary relationship with classical antiquity, including engagements with authors such as Homer, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Petronius, Apuleius, and Horace, in a variety of types of programmes from wartime propaganda work, which used ancient Greek history to comment on the international situation, to lighter entertainment programmes drawing on the Roman novel. MacNeice's educational background in classics, combined with his skill as a writer and his ability in exploring radio's potential for creative work, resulted in programmes
which brought the ancient world imaginatively alive for a massive, popular audience at home and abroad. Each script is prefaced by an individual introduction, written by the editors Amanda Wrigley and Stephen Harrison and guest contributor Gonda Van Steen, detailing the political and broadcasting contexts, the relationship of the script with classical antiquity, notes on cast and credits, and the reception of each script's radio performance amongst contemporary listeners. The volume opens with a general introduction which seeks to contextualise the scripts in MacNeice's wider life and work for radio, and it includes an appendix of extant MacNeicean scripts and recordings. The URL to the OUP catalogue, with further details about the contents, is: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199 695232.do#.Ubwy1euiIXw The book will be launched in October 2013 at a conference at Corpus Christi College, Oxford which aims to mark the half-century since MacNeice's death by considering the full span of MacNeice's career as writer and producer for radio from 1941 to his death in 1963. Please contact [email protected] for the conference programme and information about registration.
Amanda Wrigley and her husband Dez are also delighted to announce the safe arrival of their twins, Matilda and Dylan, on 13 February 2013!
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