"This is Stevens speaking, and now he is torturing you": sound, language, and the self in the work of Patrick Hamilton

'No one in England has mastered the technique of the radio play so successfully as Mr.
Hamilton' (Fenton 1939). Patrick Hamilton wrote nine radio plays, but these rarely feature in
critical accounts of his work. This is a missed opportunity for an author so concerned with the
vagaries of communication. Offering the first comprehensive analysis of Hamilton's career, my
thesis will draw on Hamilton's radio dramas, novels, and stage plays to argue that his work is
fundamentally concerned with the power of the spoken word to torture others and the self.
Following Cohen, Coyle, and Lewty's identification of the 'inescapability of radio as a
feature of the Modernist landscape', studies of sound in this period have flourished (Broadcasting
Modernism 2009). However, as Cohen reflected in 2020, these studies continue to focus on 'the
overtly avant-garde' and to isolate radio from other forms of cultural production. In presenting
Hamilton's realist radio dramas alongside his novels and stage plays, my research will expand
modernist sound studies beyond canonical modernism, avant-garde experimentation, or a rigid
radio monoculture. While Angela Frattarola's Modernist Soundscapes (2018) interprets the
modernist experience of sound as 'connecting and inclusive', Hamilton's work reveals a
disjointed and distressed subjectivity, ruptured both by burgeoning new sound technologies and
a deep-seated anxiety triggered by political unrest and international conflict