Rural scenes and national representation
Subtitle: Britain, 1815-1850
By: Elizabeth K. Helsinger.
Series: Literature in history; Literature in history (Princeton, N.J.)
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Princeton, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 290
Subjects: English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Rural conditions in literature; Literature and history -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century; Art and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century; Pastoral literature, English -- History and criticism; National characteristics, British, in literature; Landscape painting, British -- 19th century; Landscape in literature; Peasants in literature; Great Britain -- Rural conditions
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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.