Rural Modernity in Britain

Abstract

Rural Modernity in Britain argues that the rural areas of twentieth-century Britain were impacted by modernization just as much—if not more—than urban and suburban areas. It shifts the focus for studies of modernity and modernism onto the art, industries, and everyday life of rural people and places. In the early twentieth century, rural areas 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? The fifteen chapters of Rural Modernity address these questions through investigations into fiction, non-fiction, film, music, and painting, among other genres and media. They focus on men and women writers and artists, with progressive, moderate, or conservative politics, modernist, middlebrow, or proletarian tastes, from Scottish, Welsh, and English regions. Together, the chapters make an interdisciplinary 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.