Fall 2025 Seminar: Imagining the English Countryside
Joanne Myers: Professor-English
Only one-fifth of the British population lives in a rural area, but the idea of the countryside remains central to British identity. British people book holiday breaks at Cottages.com and join “rambling” clubs that organize walks in the countryside. They treat “Jerusalem,” William Blake’s nineteenth-century lament about industrialization, rooted in a vision of England as a “green and pleasant land,” as an unofficial national anthem. But why exactly do representations of the countryside matter so much in the national imagination?
To answer this question, we will examine how the countryside has helped to define Englishness
in three historical moments. First, we will analyze how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors repurposed the classical opposition between “city” and “country” to cope with the rapid changes wrought by modernity, not least of which was the exodus of people from rural spaces to urban centers. Next, we will look at the visual art, poetry, and children’s literature of the Romantic period to understand why the Lake District in particular became a compelling place of retreat as industrialization began to remake the English countryside. Lastly, turning to the present day, we will explore how the development of “English heritage” as a powerhouse economic industry in the United Kingdom has offered ways to negotiate cultural identity during the decline and dissolution of the British empire. Throughout, we will remain attentive to the way a celebration of rural life is bound up with nostalgia and often-exclusionary ideas about who does and does not belong in “the heart of England.”
Course satisfies an Interdisciplinary Course requirement for the Gettysburg Curriculum and an elective for English majors and minors (period requirement of pre-1900 literature).