Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention

ISBN-13: 9781474473187 / Angielski / Miękka / 2020 / 328 str.

Kristin Bluemel;Michael McCluskey

Opis

Rural Modernity in Britain argues that the rural areas of Britain were impacted by modernisation just as much - if not more - than urban and suburban areas. It is the first study of modernity and modernism to focus on rural people and places that experienced economic depression, the expansion of transportation and communication networks, the roll out of electricity, the loss of land, and the erosion of local identities. Who celebrated these changes? Who resisted them? Who documented them? Essays in this collection make the case that the rural means more than just the often-studied countryside of southern England, a retreat from the consequences of modernity; rather, the rural emerges as a source for new versions of the modern, with an active role in the formation and development of British experiences and representations of modernity.

Spis treści

List of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Rural Modernity in Britain, Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey; Part I: Networks; 1. Ringing the Changes: Thomas Hardy’s Communication Networks, Edward Allen; 2. Change in the Village: Filming Rural Britain, Michael McCluskey; 3. Electricity Comes to the Countryside: Visual Representations of a Connected Countryside in the Early Twentieth Century, Rosemary Shirley; Part II: Landscapes; 4. Weighing Down the Landscape: The Quarry as a Site of Rural Modernity, Samuel Shaw; 5. Windmills and Woodblocks: Agnes Miller Parker, Wood Engraving and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain, Kristin Bluemel; 6. Hiraeth and Ambiguous Pastorals: Wales, England and Rural Modernities between the Wars, Christopher Hopkins; Part III: Communities; 7. The ‘Uncertainty of Our Climate’: Mary Kelly and the Rural Theatre, Andrew Walker; 8. The Spinster in Eden: Reclaiming Civilisation in Interwar British Rural Fiction, Stella Deen; 9. Transformative Pastoral: Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scot’s Quair, Nick Hubble; Part IV: Heritage; 10. Borderlands: Visual and Material Culture in the Interwar Anglo-Scottish Borders, Ysanne Holt; 11. Beyond Portmeirion: The Architecture, Planning and Protests of Clough Williams-Ellis, Nigel Harrison and Iain Robertson; 12. Celebrating England: ‘Heritage’ Writing and the Rural Novelist, Dominic Head; Part V: Wars; 13. Altered Countrysides: Paul Nash, David Jones and Eric Ravilious in Wartime, Eluned Summers-Bremner; 14. Eden in Sussex: Atheist Moderns and the Berwick Church Murals, Hana Leaper and Polly Mills; 15. Rural Modernity in a Time of Crisis: Preservation and Reform in the Books of B. T. Batsford , Peter Lowe; Notes on Contributors; Bibliography; Index.