ABSTRACT
The manners through which these various aspects are pursued, interrogated, and resisted in both concertos leads to striking stylistic plurality, with materials poised between synthesis and contradiction. During processes of expanding industrialization, the urban imperils the rural. When a city becomes a metropolis, it engulfs the countryside lying around its edges. The bonds and mutuality identified with the pastoral life are threatened by this urban development and become idealized alternatives to the quickened but weakened connectivity of the metropolis, the disorientating experience influentially analysed at the beginning of the twentieth century by Georg Simmel. Laura Berlant notes that ‘sentimental culture’ invokes a ‘community of individuals sanctified by recognising the authority of true feeling’. The concept of authenticity which underpins the associated constructions of cultural community, national belonging, and collective artistic practice is one which, as Allan Moore put it, ‘builds a refuge of meaning within the bourgeois romantic critique of industrial society’.
