ABSTRACT
Although it is one of the enduring paradoxes of modern western civilisation, it is also a phenomenon which reaches back as far as classical times, when the emergence of city life produced the first sense of the distinctiveness of rural and urban worlds. Since then the country and the city have acquired a range of contrasting associations. These have often cast the countryside in a negative light, comparing it unfavourably to the sophistication and power of the city. Yet nostalgia for pastoral golden ages, as Raymond Williams’s seminal analysis of literary responses to the country and the city so eloquently argued, is as old as civilisation itself (Williams 1973). And whenever urban civilisations have reached their zenith the pendulum, as Tuan (1974) has observed, appears to have swung especially strongly in favour of the country. No urban epoch has exhibited this more than our own. As the modern western urban-industrial system has tightened its grip on life and landscape, sentiment towards the countryside seems to have reached idealistic proportions, acquiring almost mythological status in our mental view of the world and at the same time becoming increasingly valued as a tangible alternative to urban life.
