Rural Modernity and the Wood Engraving Revival in Interwar England

Abstract

‘Rural Modernity and the Wood Engraving Revival in Interwar England’ brings analysis of a specific kind of visual-verbal text, wood-engraved books about the English countryside, and the means of these texts' production, to bear upon debates over rural modernity -what is it, where is it, who owns it-in order to more thoroughly engage literary and arts scholars in debates over the meaning of modernity for rural England and rural England for modernity. Framed by analysis of the work of social historians and cultural critics of rural England and ‘Englishness’, it takes as its supporting case studies two mass-marketed books: A. G. Street's Farmer's Glory (1932), with wood engravings by Gwen Raverat, and Francis Brett Young's Portrait of a Village (1937), with wood engravings by Joan Hassall. I argue that these and other books with wood engravings have a special story to tell about the relation of this interwar ‘flood’ of printed matter to rural England, serving as uniquely productive meeting places for interwar writers, illustrators, publishers, and readers to participate in the paradoxical crisis of England's rural depression and modernisation.