Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama

Radio drama has been around for more than one hundred years and is still vibrant in many countries. A narrative-dramatic genre and art form in its own right, radio drama has traditionally crossed medial and generic boundaries and continues to do so in our age of digitization. Audionarratology: Lessons from Audio Drama, edited by Lars Bernaerts and Jarmila Mildorf, explores radio drama from a narratological angle. The contributions cover key questions surrounding audiophonic meaning-making, storyworld creation, mediation, focalization, suspense, unreliability, and ambiguity as well as the relationship between script and performance, seriality, antinarrative tendencies, and radio drama’s political implications now and in its early days. The book thus explores the interplay between sound, voices, music, language, silence, electroacoustic manipulation, and narrative structures. Providing examples from American, Australian, British, Dutch, and German radio drama-such as I Love a Mystery, The War of the Worlds, andTheHitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-this book has important insights for scholars working in transmedial narratology, media studies, literary and cultural studies, theatre and performance studies, and communication studies as well as for practitioners and lovers of radio drama alike.

Lars Bernaerts is Associate Professor at Ghent University in Belgium. Jarmila Mildorf is Associate Professor at the University of Paderborn in Germany.