Rural Scenes and National Representation
：Britain, 1815-1850
( Princeton Legacy Library )
Publication subTitle ：Britain, 1815-1850
Publication series ：Princeton Legacy Library
Author： Helsinger Elizabeth K.;;;
Publisher： Princeton University Press
Publication year： 2014
E-ISBN: 9781400864379
P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780691021461
Subject： I Literature;I06 Literature, Literature Appreciation
Keyword： 文学
Language： ENG
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Description
Elizabeth Helsinger's iconoclastic book explores the peculiar power of rural England to stand for conflicting ideas of Britain. Despite the nostalgic appeal of Constable's or Tennyson's rural scenes, they record the severe social and economic disturbances of the turbulent years after Waterloo. Artists and writers like Cobbett, Clare, Turner, Emily Brontë, 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.
Drawing on recent work in social history, nationalism, and geography, as well as the visual and literary arts, Helsinger recovers other possible and alternative readings of social ties embedded in the imagery of land. She reflects on the power of rural images to transfer local loyalties to the national scene, first popularizing then institutionalizing them. By turning a critical gaze on these scenes, she comments on the difference between art and ideology, and the problems and dangers of asserting any kind of national identity through imagery of the land.
Originally published in 1996.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously ou
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