ABSTRACT
Interpreting rurality means understanding that rurality is, among other things, a cultural construction with a history and a politics. But if we are to assess how the rural imaginary operates now in the twenty-first century it is arguably useful to look back on what happened to the rural imaginary in the twentieth century. The aim of this chapter is to focus on one aspect of rurality, the romanticisation of the English farm. It will be argued that this image is of much more recent, twentieth century, provenance than is usually assumed — namely the inter-war period — that it flourished in the immediate post-war period from 1945 to the 1970s and has been under threat for reasons that are probably too familiar to require stating since the 1980s. This paper discusses two key texts in the construction of the popular image of the English Farm, both bestsellers at the time of publication though largely forgotten since, Corduroy (1930) by Adrian Bell and The Story of a Norfolk Farm (1941) by Henry Williamson. It seeks to relate these ‘farm texts’ to the larger and longer tradition of pastoral in English literature, and in particular to the work of two great ruralists of the canonical English literary tradition, Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence. Second, it argues that these inter-war farm texts participated in and helped inaugurate a cultural celebration of the English farm and farming especially in children's literature and visual and material culture after World War II that has more recently been superseded. Third, it suggests that the key characteristics of these ‘farm texts’ can offer insight into the persistence and meaning of rurality in the twenty-first century.
