ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the logic and power of 'spatial stories' in making sense of the rural world. It also explores the way rural studies come to be imagined through the idea of narrative and considers the problems and dilemmas that are raised in doing so. Events are the building blocks of any narrative style in rural studies. They refer to the process of change and are the means by which the rural is re-produced as an object of inquiry. As causal realities, classical narratives function by inextricably tying each story event, by implication or motivation, to other events. The narrative style of rural studies is typically to view its narrative protagonist’s recursively, as simultaneously active and passive, shaped and shaping, cause and outcome. It is a narrative style that seeks to assert the singular importance of one particular theory of the world and one particular way of bringing it into being.
