Rural scenes and national representation

Description:

Elizabeth Helsinger's iconoclastic book explores the peculiar power of rural England to stand for conflicting ideas of Britain. Despite their nostalgic appeal, Constable's or Tennyson's rural scenes recorded the severe social and economic disturbances of the turbulent years after Waterloo. Artists and writers like Cobbett, Clare, Turner, Emily Bronte, and George Eliot competed to claim the English countryside as ideological ground. No image of rural life produced consensus over the great questions: who should constitute the nation, and how should they be represented? Helsinger ponders how some images of rural life and land come to serve as national metaphors while others challenge their constructions of Englishness at the heart of the British Empire.

subjects: Art and literature,  British Landscape painting,  English Pastoral literature,  English literature,  History,  History and criticism,  Landscape in literature,  Landscape painting, British,  Literature and history,  National characteristics, British, in literature,  Pastoral literature, English,  Peasants in literature,  Rural conditions,  Rural conditions in literature,  English literature, history and criticism, 19th century,  Pastoral literature, history and criticism,  National characteristics in literature,  Landscapes in literature,  Landscape painting

Places: Great Britain

Times: 19th century