Abstract
The article explores the idealization of rural landscape and rural life in contemporary English popular culture, raising issues that are underemphasized in earlier accounts of the rural as a stabilizing element in the social and economic order. Rural imagery has an emotional resonance in the unconscious realm of phantasy: it offers secure access to and possession of a good object. In media accounts, the countryside provides a sequestered, sensuous place of healing, although recent countryside imagery is also concrete in emotional quality, with a disturbing intensity, suggestive of Kleinian accounts of paranoid splitting. The article points to social theories of late modernity, in which the pressures and disruptions of the current socio-economic order contribute to a generalized fragmentation of consciousness. The persecutory tone of some popular accounts of the countryside is one of the consequences of this, transforming the rural world into a damaged maternal body.
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