The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850

by Edited by Gerald MacLean , Donna Landry , Joseph P. Ward

• ISBN13: 9780521032278
• ISBN10: 052103227X
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-11-23
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Between 1550 and 1850, the great age of mercantilism, the English people remade themselves from a disparate group of individuals and localities divided by feudal loyalties, dialects and even languages, into an imperial power. Examining literature, art and social life, and returning to ground first explored by Raymond Williams in his seminal work, The Country and the City Revisited traces this transformation. It shows that what Williams figured as an urban-rural dichotomy can now be more satisfactorily grasped as a permeable boundary. While the movement of sugar, tobacco and tea became ever more deeply interfused with the movement of people, through migration and the slave trade, these commodies initiated new conceptions of space, time and identity. Spanning the traditional periods of the Renaissance and Romanticism, this collection of essays offers exciting interdisciplinary perspectives on central issues of early modern English history.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Notes on contributors

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations and notes on the text

Introduction: the country and the city revisited, c. 1550-1850

Imagining the metropolis in Elizabethan and Stuart London

The peripatetic muse: internal travel and the cultural production of space in pre-revolutionary England

The Cookes and the Brookes: uses of portraiture in town and country before the Civil War

Digger writing and rural dissent in the English Revolution: representing England as a common treasury

'Gulfes, Deserts, Precipices, Stone': Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House' and the contradictions of 'nature'

Enthusiasm and Enlightenment: of food, filth and slavery

'What is the country?': patriotism and the language of popularity during the English militia reform of 1757

Who's making the scene? Real people in eighteenth-century topographical prints

Imperial georgic, 1660-1789

The gentleman planter and the metropole: Long's History of Jamaica (1774)

Crown forests and female georgic: Frances Burney and the reconstruction of Britishness

'Wild outcasts of society': the transit of the Gypsies in Romantic period poetry

Afterword: moving stories, still lives

Index

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