Class, Culture, and the Agrarian Myth

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

Acknowledgements
Introduction

I. CULTURE, TRADITION AND MODERNITY
1 Cultural Struggle ‘From Below’
2 Cultural Struggle ‘From Above’
3 Development caught between Tradition and Modernity

II. SCREEN IMAGES OF RURAL STRUGGLE
4 Horror, Humour, Fiends and Fools
5 Best of Friends, or Worst of Enemies?

III. CULTURE, CLASS STRUGGLE AND TRAVEL
6 The Grand Tour, or From Cosmopolitanism to Nationalism
7 Mass Tourism, or the Mob-in-the-streets Travels Abroad
8 Venice – Being There

Conclusion
References
Index