Summary
Contents
Subject index
The Handbook of Rural Studies represents the vitality and theoretical innovation at work in rural studies. It shows how political economy and the "cultural turn" have led to very significant new thinking in the cultural representations of: rurality; nature; sustainability; new economies; power and rurality; new consumerism; and exclusion and rurality.It is organized in three sections: approaches to rural studies; rural research: key theoretical co-ordinates and new rural relations.In a rich and textured discussion, the Handbook of Rural Studies explains the key moments in which the theorization of culture, nature, politics, agency, and space in rural contexts have transmitted ideas back into wider social science.
Idyllic Ruralities
Idyllic Ruralities
Introduction: The Rural Idyll — Ambiguity and Power
A parliamentary Environmental Select Committee, reviewing the UK 1995 Rural White Paper, noted that: ‘Rural poverty must be spoken about. Its causes and consequences discussed, perceptions of a rural idyll need to be corrected and hidden pockets of poverty sought out and relieved.’
The rural idyll is an oft-cited but culturally charged phrase which has come to particular prominence within the last 25 years, entering everyday parlance, and which has assumed a shorthand meaning covering a number of interrelated concepts and their contextual relations. It is a phrase often used pejoratively in academic circles, but one that is both ambiguous and powerful. It is, of course, also a phrase which acquires meaning only through the consciousness of, and contradistinction between an assumed ‘other’ which is un-idyllic — and this chapter will uncover the spatial and temporal correlates of that ‘othering’, without which the phrase is meaningless (Short, J., 1991: 34).
The origins of the concept have been traced elsewhere, although a full analysis of its constituent parts and their variation over time and space has not been attempted. Raymond Williams, in his well-known contribution to the development of the concept, reveals how, by uncovering successive time slices, demonstrated through literary conventions set within their historical relations, we travel back through British (more specifically English) history to an early-modern sixteenth and seventeenth century concern with a beauty and rural ease, a concern which then appears again in the late fourteenth century work Piers Plowman, and then jumps alarmingly back through time and space to a borrowed ‘golden age’ of Mediterranean Antiquity. And as Eldridge and Eldridge put it: ‘Williams offers the image of the escalator. Each time one gets off at the period referred to as the golden age, there will be a contemporary writer to greet us and tell us that such an age has past [sic]’ (1994: 178). In the long-term overview that follows, we first encounter this archaic and classical phase before moving on to successive representations offered during the medieval, Renaissance and capitalist modern periods, the latter including the climactic years between 1860 and 1930. At the end, we look at later and more recent understandings of the term, together with some of the implications for contemporary rural society and culture.
Archaic and Classical Dimensions
In the ninth century BC, Hesiod in his Works and Days could already look back to a time of a first Golden Age when:
the fruitful earth unforced bare them [mortal men] fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods.
Hesiod was therefore recommending practical agriculture, social justice and neighbourliness to retrieve such splendour on the fertile plains of Boeotia (Williams, 1973: 24). Later versions, based on third century BC idylls of Theocritus (c. 310–250 BC) and set now on the Greek islands, on Sicily and around Alexandria, downplayed Hesiod's concern with practical crop production and flock maintenance in favour of a pastoral life within simple communities. Thus
...
- Loading...
Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL
-
Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life -
Read modern, diverse business cases
-
Explore hundreds of books and reference titles
Read next
More like this
Sage Recommends
We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.
Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches