We begin with the origin of the city/countryside dialectic and review the historical literature on the nature of the city. We then introduce the contradictions between urban and rural, acknowledging the important concept of the metabolic rift, followed by Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the “right to the city.” Finally, the analytical framing of popular rural social movements is discussed in the rural/urban contradictory framing.

This chapter examines the countryside of late antique southern Gaul as a context for the development of popular culture at this time, making use of archaeological as well as literary evidence. It covers Provence, with a particular focus on the territorium of the city of Arles, although areas of western Languedoc are also considered due to the exceptional archaeological data available. Key themes and questions arising from recent scholarship are introduced to shape the discussion that follows before the landscape of the region is introduced. The inhabitants of the region are discussed next, in terms of their social and legal status, while the following section considers developments in settlement and social organisation, including the fate of the villa. A detailed look at livelihoods and patterns of productive activity follows. The final section looks at religious structures and landscapes, including the impact of the church in the late antique countryside.

This chapter provides an overview of the conditions and experiences of the 22 million people who lived on farms and who inhabited the villages and small towns in the countryside during the revolution. The relationship between these people and revolutionary legislators in Paris was one of negotiation, confrontation and dialogue. This chapter will highlight how rural dwellers adopted, adapted and resisted change from the capital. It discusses the cahiers de doléances, not only as they represent a decisive moment of mass politicization, but also because they emphasize so very well the concerns, hopes and fears of the majority of the population. The chapter also pays attention to the various waves of peasant insurrection – against feudalism and taxation – during 1789-1793. A balance sheet is drawn up for the outcomes of the French Revolution for the rural population, which reveals that changes in family life, religious practices and socio-economic relations combined to fundamentally alter the mental universe of all French citizens.

This chapter examines 1890s women poets through the lens of ecology. By focusing on three main parameters (countryside, city, and empire), the chapter offers a new landscape of poets and poetries of the 1890s and argues that some of the most advanced ecological thinking of the period appeared in women’s poetry. Starting with Christina Rossetti, the chapter unveils how poets of the 1890s used genres such as the pastoral, realist, and symbolist poetry paradigmatically to produce powerful critiques of agrilogistics, globalization and eco-colonialism at the fin de siècle. Central to the chapter is its focus on polluted environments. Looking at Amy Levy and Alice Meynell, it shows how their poetics of soot and grime argued for green spaces to combat the damaged caused by the coal industry to modern city living. The chapter also analyzes the anticolonial poetics of Katharine Tynan and Sarojini Naidu and their use of autochthonous plants in their fight against the British empire.

The introduction outlines the aims, methodology and time frame of the book, explains its structure and briefly introduces readers to the eight individuals whose diaries are the book’s principal source material. A succinct review of the literature on elite and popular ruralism in Britain follows, emphasizing that there has been far more research on the former than the latter. The pathbreaking work of Helen Walker, Harvey Taylor and Alun Howkins on popular ruralism is acknowledged and summarized. Although we now know much about the macro-history of popular ruralism (at least as expressed through the outdoor movement), we know much less about its micro-history – how the countryside fitted into the lived reality of people’s lives. This is the gap which this book aims to fill.

The state’s military engagement created the impossibility of returning to a normal civilian life, thus requiring the invention of a new social status. Whereas society was divided on the basis of residential location and professional activity, the war cut across social classes, making certain categories of victims permanent recipients of support. The Law of 23 June 1912, first aimed at veterans of the war against Japan, was adapted over the course of the two following conflicts: it established the definition of a wounded soldier, then of a disabled veteran, and finally of a disabled person in general. The law set thresholds that were constantly debated, pensions that were endlessly disputed, and rights (to clothing, housing, food, education) that remained mainly theoretical. The vast majority of disabled ex-servicemen remained passive, only existing on the basis of lists drawn up by hospitals or administrative offices. But a minority of individuals sought to understand their rights, take advantage of possibilities open to them, and secure concrete recognition of the state’s moral debt. With their demands, they fortified their legal status and improved the plight of their group by forcing experts to be more rigorous and precise. In this way, the state of war thus furthered the rule of law in Russia.

The chapter sketches an approach to a great challenge of contemporary ancient history, namely, the history whereby state power was extended into the ancient countryside. It commences with consideration of the operations that produced Roman taxonomies of city-states and villages: far from a simple consequence of recognition, the statuses of city-state and village alike were ascribed. The chapter directs attention to the decades when Rome ceased to treat with regions via networks of bilateral alliances and instead instrumentalized select city-states to dominate territories and peoples that were henceforth deemed non-political. On this basis, the chapter challenges the interpretive truisms that Rome “governed through city-states” or that it relied on preexisting institutions. What we should seek to bring into view is the political economics of republican empire: the related forms of fiscal domination and monopolies over law-making and law-applying institutions that the democratically constituted oligarchies of the ancient city exercised over others on behalf of Rome.

Chapter 3 explores modernist uses of the pastoral that deny the escape into nature and emphasize instead the biological limitations of human life. This dark pastoral mode coincides with setbacks to nature preservation in the United Kingdom during and following WWI and heightening during the economically stressful 1930s. Beginning with the iconic presentations of decay and destruction found in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the chapter considers Eliot’s symbolic registers of waste and regeneration in relation to actual attempts at land restoration in the United Kingdom. As the first large land holding entrusted to the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, the case of Woodwalton Fen presents the tensions between “reserving nature” and “putting lands in order.” The undoing of pastoral retreat at the hands of anthropogenic control develops further in the early poems of W. H. Auden and arrives most forcefully in the fiction of Djuna Barnes, whose dark pastoral aesthetic subverts Thoreauvian notions of self-sufficiency in nature. Robin Vote as the “black sheep” in Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood poses a queer resilience to those who seek to tame and exploit living beings.

Often associated with urban institutions as coffeehouses and learned societies, the Enlightenment included fascination with outsiders – wild men, feral children, shipwrecked solitaries and local savages, or rustics. The long eighteenth-century theatre showcases this interest in “local savagery” in particular through a huge expansion in the number of plays set in spas, villages and country estates. These plays expand the collective vision of the nation, often celebrating the countryside as the green heart of England, the site of immemorial rights and model of social harmony. Just as frequently however, this pastoral image is threatened or subverted by Irish or labouring-class writers such as Robert Dodsley and Oliver Goldsmith, who highlight the local injustice and imperial violence that holds the rural (and national) hierarchy in place. This chapter maps rural dramaturgy from the Restoration forward to reveal these conflicting representational strategies, as Whigs and Tories fought to claim the nation’s heartland as the symbolic ground of political legitimacy and were followed by increasingly radical outliers whose view of rural society was considerably more critical.