Representing The Rural

Students and film scholars will appreciate this unique volume.

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.

Focuses on how certain constructs are bound up with ideas of tradition, power, and conformity and have become privileged over other constructs. Provides examples of the experiences of certain marginalized groups within rural areas, explores the activities of a number of groups that have attempted to challenge mainstream perceptions and usage, and considers changing rural power structures and some key confrontations between new rural residents and traditional elites. Among the topics are re-negotiating the boundaries of race and citizenship, rural pollution and environmental others, hunt followers, diverging voices in a rural Welsh community, and gendered experiences of community in village life. Distributed in the US by Books International. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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.

Shaping Rural Areas in Europe. Perceptions and Outcomes on the Present and the Future sets out to investigate the effect of urban perceptions about the rural and consequent demands on rurality on the present and future configurations of rural territories in Europe in the early twenty-first century. This volume presents and discusses a broad range of case studies and theoretical and methodological approaches from different academic fields, mainly Anthropology, Sociology and Geography.

Representing Rural Women highlights the complexity and diversity of representations of rural women in the U.S. and Canada from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The 15 chapters in this collection offer fresh perspectives on representations of rural women in literature, popular culture, and print, digital, and social media. They explore a wide range of time periods, geographic spaces, and rural women’s experiences, including Mormon pioneer women, rural lesbians in the 1970s, Canadian rural women’s organizations, and rural trans youth. In their stories, these women and girls navigate the complex realities of rural life, create spaces for self-expression, develop networks to communicate their experiences, and challenge misconceptions and stereotypes of rural womanhood. The chapters in this collection consider the ways that rural geography allows freedoms as well as imposes constraints on women’s lives, and explore how cultural representations of rural womanhood both reflect and shape women’s experiences.

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.

“An important contribution to the literature on contemporary American politics. Both methodologically and substantively, it breaks new ground.” —Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare When Scott Walker was elected Governor of Wisconsin, the state became the focus of debate about the appropriate role of government. In a time of rising inequality, Walker not only survived a bitterly contested recall, he was subsequently reelected. But why were the very people who would benefit from strong government services so vehemently against the idea of big government? With The Politics of Resentment, Katherine J. Cramer uncovers an oft-overlooked piece of the puzzle: rural political consciousness and the resentment of the “liberal elite.” Rural voters are distrustful that politicians will respect the distinct values of their communities and allocate a fair share of resources. What can look like disagreements about basic political principles are therefore actually rooted in something even more fundamental: who we are as people and how closely a candidate’s social identity matches our own. Taking a deep dive into Wisconsin’s political climate, Cramer illuminates the contours of rural consciousness, showing how place-based identities profoundly influence how people understand politics. The Politics of Resentment shows that rural resentment—no less than partisanship, race, or class—plays a major role in dividing America against itself.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA/ERS) maintains four highly related but distinct geographic classification systems to designate areas by the degree to which they are rural. The original urban-rural code scheme was developed by the ERS in the 1970s. Rural America today is very different from the rural America of 1970 described in the first rural classification report. At that time migration to cities and poverty among the people left behind was a central concern. The more rural a residence, the more likely a person was to live in poverty, and this relationship held true regardless of age or race. Since the 1970s the interstate highway system was completed and broadband was developed. Services have become more consolidated into larger centers. Some of the traditional rural industries, farming and mining, have prospered, and there has been rural amenity-based in-migration. Many major structural and economic changes have occurred during this period. These factors have resulted in a quite different rural economy and society since 1970. In April 2015, the Committee on National Statistics convened a workshop to explore the data, estimation, and policy issues for rationalizing the multiple classifications of rural areas currently in use by the Economic Research Service (ERS). Participants aimed to help ERS make decisions regarding the generation of a county rural-urban scale for public use, taking into consideration the changed social and economic environment. This report summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

*Finalist for the National Book Award* *Finalist for the Kirkus Prize* *Instant New York Times Bestseller* *Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, New York Post, BuzzFeed, Shelf Awareness, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly* An essential read for our times: an eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in America that will deepen our understanding of the ways in which class shapes our country and “a deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight”.* Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland. During Sarah’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, she enjoyed the freedom of a country childhood, but observed the painful challenges of the poverty around her; untreated medical conditions for lack of insurance or consistent care, unsafe job conditions, abusive relationships, and limited resources and information that would provide for the upward mobility that is the American Dream. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves with clarity and precision but without judgement, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country. Beautifully written, in a distinctive voice, Heartland combines personal narrative with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, challenging the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. “Heartland is one of a growing number of important works—including Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and Amy Goldstein’s Janesville—that together merit their own section in nonfiction aisles across the country: America’s postindustrial decline...Smarsh shows how the false promise of the ‘American dream’ was used to subjugate the poor. It’s a powerful mantra” *(The New York Times Book Review).