Greenwood, Katherine (2023) A Common Countryside: Rewriting the English Rural in Common People. Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism (21). pp. 11-29.

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Abstract

Fifty years after the publication of Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, this article considers Williams’s legacy in contemporary stories of class and the countryside by Adelle Stripe and Anita Sethi in Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers and beyond. These stories together address the underrepresentation of the rural and the urban working classes in literature today, revealing the continued relevance of Williams’s account of a countryside ‘scribbled over’ by a certain form of metropolitan nostalgia, while allowing us to extend his analysis of the ‘middle-class rural convention’ to an account which entwines the politics of place, race, gender and class. Williams’s central argument about the interconnection of country and city is also examined
in relation to the concept of the ‘edgeland’, the places and spaces between country and city which are an expanding feature of contemporary geography and have a particular resonance in relation to writing by marginalised groups in society

Item Type:	Article
Status:	Published
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PR English literature
School/Department:	School of Humanities
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/14041

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