Rural Modernity in Britain

Kristin Bluemel is Professor of English and Wayne D. McMurray Chair in the Humanities at Monmouth University in New Jersey. She is the author of books on modernist Dorothy Richardson and intermodernist George Orwell; articles and chapters on regional and middlebrow writers; editor of Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (EUP, 2011), and past editor of the journal The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945. Her work in progress examines interwar women wood engravers. Michael McCluskey is Lecturer in English and Film Studies at the University of York. Among his published articles are: ‘Humphrey Jennings in the East End: Fires Were Started and Local Geographies’ for London Journal, and ‘The Postman’s Daily Round: English Journeys in 1930s Documentary Film’ for The Space Between, Literature and Culture 1914-1945 6.1 (2011): 105-23.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Rural Modernity in BritainKristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskeyPart I: Networks1: Ringing the Changes: Thomas Hardy’s Communication NetworksEdward Allen2: Change in the Village: Filming Rural BritainMichael McCluskey3: Electricity Comes to the Countryside: Visual Representations of a Connected Countryside in the Early Twentieth CenturyRosemary ShirleyPart II: Landscapes4: Weighing Down the Landscape: The Quarry as a Site of Rural ModernitySamuel Shaw5: Windmills and Woodblocks: Agnes Miller Parker, Wood Engraving and the Popular Press in Interwar BritainKristin Bluemel6: Hiraeth and Ambiguous Pastorals: Wales, England and Rural Modernities between the WarsChristopher HopkinsPart III: Communities7: The ‘Uncertainty of Our Climate’: Mary Kelly and the Rural TheatreAndrew Walker8: The Spinster in Eden: Reclaiming Civilisation in Interwar British Rural FictionStella Deen 9: Transformative Pastoral: Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scot’s QuairNick HubblePart IV: Heritage10: Borderlands: Visual and Material Culture in the Interwar Anglo-Scottish BordersYsanne Holt11: Beyond Portmeirion: The Architecture, Planning and Protests of Clough Williams-EllisNigel Harrison and Iain Robertson12: Celebrating England: ‘Heritage’ Writing and the Rural NovelistDominic HeadPart V: Wars13: Altered Countrysides: Paul Nash, David Jones and Eric Ravilious in WartimeEluned Summers-Bremner14: Eden in Sussex: Atheist Moderns and the Berwick Church Murals Hana Leaper and Polly Mills15: Rural Modernity in a Time of Crisis: Preservation and Reform in the Books of B. T. Batsford Peter LoweNotes on ContributorsBibliographyIndex

Rural Modernity in Britain doesn’t merely fill a notable gap in studies of "modernism" and "modernity"—it provides a new template for understanding these terms in reference to Britain. Charting diverse, regionally inflected responses to modernity, the volume moves beyond the model of a single "countryside" as the locus of nostalgia or the weekend fantasies of modern urban dwellers to render the "rural" complex and vital.