The English Countryside

Representations, Identities, Mutations

David Haigron

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319532721
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319532738
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of essays examines representations of the English countryside and its mutations, and what they reveal about a nation's, communities' or individuals' search for identity – and fear of losing it. Based on a pluridisciplinary approach and a variety of media, this book challenges the view that the English countryside is an apolitical space characterised by permanence and lack of conflict. It analyses how the pastoral motif is actually subverted to explore liminal spaces and temporalities. The authors deconstruct the "rural idyll" myth to show how it plays a distinctive and yet ambiguous part in defining Englishness/Britishness. A must read for both scholars and students interested in British rural and cultural history, media and literature.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Tables
• Editor and Contributors
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Part I Rural Communities and Modernity: The English Countryside as an Invested Space
• Chapter 2 Rural Protest in England
• Chapter 3 Agents, Beneficiaries and Victims: Picturing People on the Land
• Chapter 4 Visions of Rurality in Popular British Fictional Television Series from the 1970s to the Present Day
• Part II Praised Harmony and Revealing Dissonance: The English Countryside as a Resonant Space
• Chapter 5 Rural Landscape in Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Space and Robinson in Ruins
• Chapter 6 London’s Parks, Suburbs and Environs: The English Countryside through the Eyes of French Visitors (1814–1914)
• Chapter 7 Myths of ‘Old England’ Revisited: Thomas Hardy’s Dissonant Representations of Rural Spaces in Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, and the Woodlanders
• Chapter 8 Going and Staying: Traditional Music in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy
• Part III Exploration and Meaning: The English Countryside as a Liminal Space
• Chapter 9 ‘The Innocent Island’: A Language of Violence in Woolf and Bowen
• Chapter 10 Rosamond Lehmann’s In-between Landscapes: Taking Possession of the ‘Empty Pastoral Scene’
• Chapter 11 Rural Sites: Transformations and Experiment in the Poetry of Mark Goodwin
• Index