ABSTRACT
In the introduction to this volume we argued that two main narratives shape the English countryside: a narrative of ‘pastoralism’ that sees rural areas as properly lying outside industrial or capitalist modes of development; and a ‘modernist’ narrative that wishes to incorporate the countryside within rationally administered and progressive processes of change. The first sees the countryside as a pre-modern space; the second sees the countryside as requiring integration into modernity and its institutions. We proposed that the relationship between these two narratives varies according to the structural and spatial context.
