Using examples from different historical contexts, this book examines the relationship between class, nationalism, modernity and the agrarian myth.
Essentializing rural identity, traditional culture and quotidian resistance, both aristocratic/plebeian and pastoral/Darwinian forms of agrarian myth discourse inform struggles waged 'from above' and 'from below', surfacing in peasant movements, film and travel writing.
Film depictions of royalty, landowner and colonizer as disempowered, ordinary’ or well-disposed towards those below’, whose interests they share, underwrite populism and nationalism.
Although these ideologies replaced the cosmopolitanism of the Grand Tour, twentieth century travel literature continued to reflect a fear of vanishing rural otherness’ abroad, combined with the arrival there of the mass tourist, the plebeian from home.
Who gets to speak for the countryside? In Class, Culture, and the Agrarian Myth, Tom Brass explores how the idea of rural life as the heart of a nation’s identity can serve very different political ends. Drawing on peasant movements, films and travel writing, he shows how appeals to rural tradition can rally people against inequality or make landowners and labourers appear to share the same interests.
The book is relevant today because it gives us a way to listen more closely when politicians invoke the countryside or promise a return to traditional values. Whose version of rural life are they asking us to believe, and what does it leave out about who owns the land, who works it and who benefits?
