Representing The Rural

A comprehensive and in-depth examination of the role of rural space in the cinema, contributing needed analysis to existing work on space, place, and identity in film.

This book explores how the English rural has been represented in contemporary theatre and performance. Exploring a range of plays, forms, and contexts of theatre production, Representing the Rural celebrates the lively engagement with rurality on English stages since 2000, constituting the first full study of theatrical representations of rural life. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book draws on political philosophy and cultural geography in its definitions of rurality and Englishness, and works with key theoretical concepts such as nostalgia and ethnonationalism. Covering a range of perspectives from the country garden in Mike Bartlett’s Albion to agricultural labour in Nell Leyshon’s The Farm, the enclosure acts in D.C. Moore’s Common to Black rural history in Testament’s Black Men Walking, the book shows how theatre and performance can open up different ways of reading rural geographies, histories, and lives. While Representing the Rural is aimed at students and researchers of theatre and performance, its interdisciplinary scope means that it has wider appeal to other disciplines in the arts and humanities, including geography, politics, and history.

Representing Rural Women examines representations of the lives and experiences of rural women in North American literature, popular culture, and print, visual, and digital media. It highlights the complexity and diversity of rural women by considering intersecting issues of region, class, race and ethnicity, sexuality, and gender identity.

If, as a corollary of urbanization, many artists seized, as early as the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century, the city as object and scene of their reflection on a world under construction, it was not the same for rural areas. Generally speaking, until recently, the countryside's representations have been shaped by the writings of a ruling class. However, in recent decades, alongside the “country novels” or “terroir novels” that follow in line with the rustic current initiated in the nineteenth century, more demanding literary productions have emerged. These writings, often fed by the sense of loss and the end of a certain agricultural lifestyle, are also exploring the contemporary reconstructions of rural areas, little publicized. They redefine a new “regionality”, less militant and certainly less connoted in its nostalgic link to the land. This book revisits rural areas and their representations in contemporary writing, in both popular and high culture, in order to draw a global landscape of current rural areas and new regionalities.

This book explores how the English rural has been represented in contemporary theatre and performance. Exploring a range of plays, forms, and contexts of theatre production, Representing the Rural celebrates the lively engagement with rurality on English stages since 2000, constituting the first full study of theatrical representations of rural life. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book draws on political philosophy and cultural geography in its definitions of rurality and Englishness, and works with key theoretical concepts such as nostalgia and ethnonationalism. Covering a range of perspectives from the country garden in Mike Bartlett’s Albion to agricultural labour in Nell Leyshon’s The Farm, the enclosure acts in D.C. Moore’s Common to Black rural history in Testament’s Black Men Walking, the book shows how theatre and performance can open up different ways of reading rural geographies, histories, and lives. While Representing the Rural is aimed at students and researchers of theatre and performance, its interdisciplinary scope means that it has wider appeal to other disciplines in the arts and humanities, including geography, politics, and history.

Featuring chapters by an international group of scholars and academics, Rural Youth at the Crossroads discusses the challenges and contexts facing youth from rural communities in countries with legacies of socialism undergoing social, political, and economic transition. The chapters employ a variety of sources and approaches to examine rural youth outcomes, and the well-being and sustainability of rural areas. The book focuses particularly on career and educational goals, the often contradictory relations between rural schools and communities, majority-minoritized group relations, community engagement, and political attitudes. Individual chapters examine these questions and dynamics within Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Serbia, and Vietnam. In total the volume represents a unique and timely comparative discussion of the relationship between youth and rural development within transitional societies, and the challenges and opportunities for enhancing the well-being and sustainability of rural communities. Aimed at informing strategies to revitalize rural social space, this book is targeted towards social scientists with interest in sociology and rural sociology, demography, education, youth development, community/regional development, rurality, public policy, and identity formation in transitional contexts. As such, this book will have international appeal to researchers, educators, and policymakers in transitional countries, and to those interested in these topics, regions, and communities.

The hugely admired author of "The Last Fine Time" preserves and makes new the sights, smells, sounds, and poetry of country living. Klinkenborg reveals the beauty of the American landscape, not from a scenic overlook, but through a screened-in porch or from the window of a pickup driving down an empty highway in the teeth of an approaching storm.

Although there has been an increasing interest in rural tourism in terms of research, training and teaching in recent years, its conceptualization and the relationships between concept and strategy are still poorly represented and not well understood. The need for such a critical understanding is particularly crucial as rural areas experience rapid change, and as tourism is viewed as a key element of development and regeneration. This volume provides an interdisciplinary approach to new directions in rural tourism, drawing on the latest conceptual thinking and evolving strategic roles. It brings together case study exemplification from the UK, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Spain, Slovenia, Poland, New Zealand and the Caribbean. It debates such key issues as sustainability and niche marketing. The book thus provides accessible material drawn from a range of environmental and cultural contexts and focuses attention on the nature and interrelationships between local and global issues in rural tourism and development.