ABSTRACT
Two main narratives act to shape perceptions of the British or, more accurately, the English countryside. The first narrative, which we might term pastoralism, finds its roots in the Romantic movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Romanticism emerged in response to the profound changes in economy, society and environment wrought by the Industrial Revolution. In responding to these changes, writers such as Wordsworth, Ruskin and Tennyson extolled the virtues of ‘unsullied’ nature as an antidote to the corrupted industrial city. Nature was to be found in areas where the degenerative impacts of urban and industrial society were largely absent. Thus, the countryside came to be valued as a zone that lies ‘beyond’ industrialism (R. Williams, 1973).
