The Country and the City. By Raymond Williams. Oxford University Press. Early in The Country and the City Raymond Williams quotes a couplet by George Crabbe (from The Village, 1783): No longer truth, though shown in verse, disdain, But own the Village Life a life of pain. The lines—written during the modern world's most transforming experience, the English Industrial Revolution—are an apology for pastoral poetry's idyllic picture of the countryside. What so outraged Crabbe—and one may substitute Williams here—was the “escalator” effect of literature in its nostalgic glances toward the land as Eden. “Escalator,” because for each writer looking back to a happier time there has always been someone a generation earlier who saw those same years as hard, and who then proceeded to look back through another deluding mist to his own bucolic youth; until, backward in time, beyond Hesiod, we reach the top (or bottom) floor of, indeed, Eden.

Raymond Williams Country And The City Pdf Merge Rogersville llc 301 northwest 63rd st suite 600 oklahoma city ok 73116 american energy merge holdings llc. Welcome to Raymond James.

It is not Williams's point that country life has always been less than perfect bliss, though surely that is true. He asserts, rather, that the picture of a Utopia in Nature has been “a myth functioning as a memory,” conjuring up false Golden Ages in the past. And, to the extent that contemporary conditions warp our view of the past, they prevent us from dealing honestly with and improving the present.

In The Country and the City Williams explores the images of the rural and urban worlds in English literature since the 16th century and shows how certain ones have persisted while others have changed. His literary examples and observations tend to support his historical interpretation: that there has been no boundary line, no sharp dichotomy between town and country; that capitalism—“the cruel economy”—did not come from the outside and destroy a manorial Utopia presided over by benevolent “rural patrons,” but that the seeds of urbanism and commercialism were sown by the rural aristocracy itself.

In the 16th century, early mercantile enclosures were launching that process of depopulation which by the 19th century had created a large industrial labor force. Williams shows how this great change affected literature: the pastoral idyllic escape was transposed to a nonexistent world—sometimes in the past, sometimes not—where there could be no “cruel tension” between two aspects of reality, as there had been earlier, even as far back as Virgil, or Hesiod. Writers, on the whole, refused to accept the actual causes and conditions of change, especially the role of the country aristocracy. As Williams puts it:...

A fault can... Occur in the whole ordering of a mind. Defense of a “vanishing countryside”—“the open air,” “the life of the fields”—can become deeply confused with that defense of the old rural order which is in any case being expressed by the landlords, the rentiers, and their literary sympathizers. A physical hatred of the noise and rush of the city can be converted... To a powerful but acrid vision of the metropolis reclaimed by the swamp and the reappearance of a woodland feudal society. Elsener Schwyz Bayonet Serial Numbers. The country thus became Eden, modernity was rejected, and, ultimately, allusions to a Golden Age served to justify the existing social order.

Raymond Williams Country And The City Pdf Merge Rogersville llc 301 northwest 63rd st suite 600 oklahoma city ok 73116 american energy merge holdings llc. Welcome to Raymond James. Counter-Pastoral The Country and the City. By Raymond Williams. Oxford University Press. Early in The Country and the City Raymond Williams quotes.

This continued, Williams shows, into the 18th century. By then, however, the spirit of the middle classes had pervaded England's countryside to such an extent that to praise an unreal natural world while at the same time defending its proprietors in the real one, poetry had to jettison the aristocratic order and welcome the one scientifically landscaped by the technical and improvement-oriented bourgeoisie. With Pope, for example, there is the “creation rather than the celebration of Nature.” But soon Williams sees poetry taking another direction with the emergence of what he calls “transitional man.” In the work of writers like Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others there now appears a sense of Romantic loss. Where before the poet had looked at the countryside and seen “Ye country houses and Retreat,/Which all the happy Gods so Love,” now the poet looks at the landscape and sees a desert: “Creation is ‘stinted,’ the brook is ‘choked,’ the cry of the bittern is ‘hollow,’ and the lapwing's cries ‘unvaried.’” As Williams explains it, since the 16th century the “social condition of poetry” had been to give a false picture of contemporary life by employing idyllic tones of the past.