ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book highlights different cultural sites for articulations of the discourse in different eras to illustrate the development of the ideology of the country house over the course of almost two centuries. It brings together articulations of country house discourse in architecture and in the proscriptive literature surrounding hospitality, linking those discourse sites to social relationships along axes of gender and race and to praxis within particular houses and particular families, whose histories are threaded. But country house discourse invokes a world in which the political relationships articulated in and by the country house form the very structure of society upon which royal power depends absolutely. The book combines a discussion of Stuart "repastoralization" proclamations with an examination of Jacobean and Caroline country house poems.
