ABSTRACT
Against these idyllic representations of rurality, however, can be set other visions of the rural. Newcomers to the rural have always found aspects of country life less than Edenic, for example-from arriviste landowners confronted by nature red in tooth and claw (Rubenstein 1981) to 1980s commuter-villagers thrown into panic by tabloid folk-devil stories about ‘rural rowdies’, city folk have often found the countryside positively dystopian. In the USA, narratives of rural regions like the ‘Deep South’, such as those contained in the gothic writings of Flannery O’Connor, have long explored the badlands of the rural; its sick, sordid, malevolent, nasty underbelly.
