¹Edinburgh, Scotland

Correspondence: Dr Kenelm Averill, 14/1 Falcon Avenue, Edinburgh EH10 4AJ, Scotland. E-mail: kenelm73@hotmail.com

Abstract

The article explores the idealization of rural landscape and rural life in contemporary English popular culture, raising issues that are underemphasized in earlier accounts of the rural as a stabilizing element in the social and economic order. Rural imagery has an emotional resonance in the unconscious realm of phantasy: it offers secure access to and possession of a good object. In media accounts, the countryside provides a sequestered, sensuous place of healing, although recent countryside imagery is also concrete in emotional quality, with a disturbing intensity, suggestive of Kleinian accounts of paranoid splitting. The article points to social theories of late modernity, in which the pressures and disruptions of the current socio-economic order contribute to a generalized fragmentation of consciousness. The persecutory tone of some popular accounts of the countryside is one of the consequences of this, transforming the rural world into a damaged maternal body.