UK RURAL IMAGINATIONS

Imagining the Rural in Contemporary British Culture

This subproject focuses on the UK, where the construction of national identity remains bound to an idyllic imagination of life in the countryside. This imagination – of a tight-knit village community offering an escape from worldly problems – also functions as a model globally, both in cultural imaginations (through the international success of rural-themed films and television series such as the Oscar-winning Gosford Park and Doc Martin, which was remade in the Netherlands as Dokter Tinus) and in social reality. An English-style village called Thames Town was, for example, constructed near Shanghai in 2006 in an attempt to decentralize the city.

In terms of rural politics, the UK has seen the rise of the Countryside Alliance, a rural advocacy group that emerged in 1997 in the context of a proposed ban on fox hunting and that portrays rural-dwellers as marginalized by urban and transnational elites (Anderson 2006; Lusoli and Ward 2005; Peeren 2019; Woods et al. 2012). In 2016, many rural voters backed Brexit on similar grounds (Beckett 2016). The notion of a growing rural-urban divide was also at the forefront of political discussions surrounding the 2001 Foot-and-Mouth disease outbreak (Bickerstaff et al. 2006), infrastructure projects crossing the countryside such as the planned high-speed rail line HS2 and energy generation methods (wind farms, fracking).

With regard to the perception of the rural in the UK, complaints about biased coverage of the countryside on the BBC led to an official review that concluded coverage was indeed sometimes “simplistic.” The content and representativeness of fictional imaginations of the rural has also led to national debate, as in the controversy surrounding the popular ITV rural crime drama Midsomer Murders, which saw a producer fired for saying that the program was “a last bastion of Englishness” that would “not work” if it included more non-white characters.

This subproject updates and moves beyond Raymond Williams’s 1973 The Country & the City (Williams 2011), the most extensive cultural-historical analysis of the rural-urban relationship in English literature so far, by looking at what 21st-century British rural imaginations in literature, film and television do and do not make visible of rural life, and what politics these imaginations support, using the theoretical framework outlined above, rural studies research on the UK (Chakraborti and Garland 2011; Chambers 2013; Griffin and Robertson 2016; Hennessy 2014; Ilbery 2014; Neal 2016; Woods 2011) and studies of past and present British cultural imaginations of the rural (Davies and White 2015; Helsinger 2014; Philips et al. 2001; Rignall and Klaus 2012; Shirley 2015; Newland 2016).

References:
Anderson, Alison. “Spinning the Rural Agenda: The Countryside Alliance, Fox Hunting and Social Policy.” Social Policy & Administration 40.6 (2006): 722-38.
Beckett, Andy. “From Trump to Brexit, Power Has Leaked from Cities to the Countryside.” Guardian, 12 December 2016. Web.
Bickerstaff, Karen, et al. “Situating Local Experience of Risk: Peripherality, Marginality and Place Identity in the UK Foot and Mouth Disease Crisis.” Geoforum 37.5 (2006): 844-58.
Chakraborti, Neil, and Jon Garland, eds. Rural Racism. London: Routledge, 2011.
Chambers, Robert. Rural Development: Putting the Last First. London: Routledge, 2013.
Davies, Owen, and Simon White. “Witchcraft and the Somerset Idyll: The Depiction of Folk Belief in Walter Raymond’s Novels.” Folklore 126.1 (2015): 53-67.
Griffin, Carl J., and Iain Robertson. “Moral Ecologies: Conservation in Conflict in Rural England.” History Workshop Journal. 82.1 (2016): 24-49.
Helsinger, Elizabeth K. Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815-1850. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014.
Hennessy, Catherine Hagan. Countryside Connections: Older People, Community and Place in Rural Britain. Bristol: Policy Press, 2014
Ilbery, Brian, ed. The Geography of Rural Change. London: Routledge, 2014.
Lusoli, Wainer, and Stephen Ward. “Hunting Protestors: Mobilisation, Participation and Protest Online in the Countryside Alliance.” The Internet and Politics: Citizens, Voters and Activists. Ed. S. Oates et al. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 52-70.
Neal, Sarah. Rural Identities: Ethnicity and Community in the Contemporary English Countryside. London: Routledge, 2016.
Newland, Paul, ed. British Rural Landscapes on Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Peeren, Esther. “The Affective Economies and Political Force of Rural Wildness.” Landscape Research 44.7 (2019): 834-845.
Philips, Martin, et al. “Putting Together Ruralities: Towards a Symbolic Analysis of Rurality in the British Mass Media.” Journal of Rural Studies 17 (2001): 1-27.
Rignall, John, and H. Gustav Klaus, eds. Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.
Shirley, Rosemary. Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. 1973. Nottingham: Spokesman, 2011.
Woods, Michael. Rural. London: Routledge, 2011.
Woods, Michael, et al. “‘The Country (side) Is Angry’: Emotion and Explanation in Protest Mobilization.” Social & Cultural Geography 13 (2012): 567-585.

Background image: screenshot from Poldark Season 3 Episode 2 (BBC)