Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention ed. by Kristin Bluemel, Michael McCluskey (review)

As Bluemel and McCluskey observe in their introduction to this valuable, wide-ranging collection of essays, modernism, as “theorised by twentieth-century critics associated with university and metropolitan centres, is a product of cities: Baudelaire’s Paris, Wyndham Lewis’s London, Kafka’s Prague, Alfred Stieglitz’s New York” (3). Different scholars might suggest different authors and places, seeing Eliot or Woolf as the central figures in London, or including Döblin’s Berlin among the literary locations, but the idea that the city was the main site of modernity continues to determine the way in which modernism is conceived and taught.

The emphasis on the urban means that readers still often understand early twentieth-century rural life primarily in its relation to the city, a tendency that draws on modernist as well as popular texts that represent the countryside as the site of retreat from an encroaching modernity. This idea of the rural is frequently mobilized as part of a necessary critique of advanced capitalism, but risks erasing the experience and histories of the populations it purports to describe, defining them negatively, by what they lack, reject, or simply have not obtained. The countryside is too often conceived as a space determined by the absence of the new, and consequently as historically as well as geographically distinct from the metropolis. In the period itself, this fantasy enabled travelers from the city to imagine that a relatively short journey would bring them into contact with lost traditions and ways of life, an idea central to what Kristin Bluemel calls the “cult of the countryside that so preoccupied interwar readers” (84). As Peter Lowe argues, popular series such as “British Heritage” and the “Face of Britain,” both issued by B. T. Batsford, encouraged the public to see their national heritage as exemplified by rural life and “as ‘threatened’ by the forces of modernity” (258). The real Britain, or more often England, could be found in the village, in the rituals and forms of work it sustained, which were made more accessible to an urban, middle-class public in particular by increasing car ownership. As Michael McCluskey argues, the idea reshaped economic relations between town and country, as “village craftsmen and women” became “heritage sites in themselves, something for tourists to seek out on excursions into rural Britain” (39). It also informed critical discourse; F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson used George Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923), with its account of a lost, coherent way of life, to support their claim that Britain had experienced a “process of dissolution” that cultural theory and analysis must address.¹ These arguments and images of rural England depended on a particular, limited understanding of the countryside that concentrated on the agricultural south, a narrow focus too often reproduced in current political rhetoric and popular narrative. The location of an authentic Englishness in seemingly prosperous rural areas like the Cotswolds and the home counties has significant implications, not least because it excludes the northern working-class in particular from discussions about the identity and future direction of the nation.

The object of Rural Modernity in Britain is not just to extend the varieties of rural places, occupations, and experiences considered in analyses of the early twentieth century, but also to contest what Edward Allen calls the “idea that all things modern originated amidst the termini and switchboards of urban life” (31). The authors recognize that the countryside was neither homogeneous nor isolated from the rapid technological and social changes that characterized the period but was reshaped by a multitude of material and cultural forces, from electrification to what Ysanne Holt describes as new “discourses about art, craft, design, aesthetic ideals, and notions of taste” (184). These processes of development were necessarily uneven, their nature and extent in any given place determined by a variety of geographical, economic, and historical factors, but few if any rural areas, no matter...