The rural idyll is a powerful force in the British national imagination. This highly original and vibrant study will examine how key moments in art history have shaped the concept of the idyll and how contemporary artists continue to access and often challenge this concept.

From High Art to propaganda, garden centers to air fresheners, contemporary art to computer games a constellation of powerful images and ideas contribute to our understandings of the rural. This publication offers new ways of thinking about the rural idyll and the countryside more broadly, through the innovative...