The Country and the City

by Raymond Williams

As a brilliant survey of English literature in terms of changing attitudes towards country and city, Williams' highly-acclaimed study reveals the shifting images and associations between these two traditional poles of life throughout the major developmental periods of English culture.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Literary Criticism, Philosophy, Theory, Criticism, Literature

335 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist, and critic. He taught for many years and the Professor of Drama at the University of Cambridge. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach. Among his many books are Culture and Society, Culture and Materialism, Politics and Letters, Problems in Materialism and Culture, and several novels.

Reviews

[Uroš Đurković · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rejmond Vilijams je kod nas najpoznatiji po knjizi „Drama od Ibzena do Brehta”, koju je čitao skoro svako ko je spremao neki ispit vezan za istoriju drame. O ovoj, daleko važnijoj knjizi, malo se ovde zna, što je šteta, jer bismo štošta posmatrali drukčije.

Iako nije novina da se odnos sela i grada posmatra kao ključan za oblikovanje ljudskog iskustva, Vilijams tako elegantno i ubedljivo razvija navedene ideje da se čini kao da je od njega sve počelo. Praćenje promena poimanja urbanog i ruralnog kroz istoriju književnosti, kroz izraženu marksističku prizmu, donosi zanimljive uvide kako o istoriji kapitalizma, tako i o menjanju granica koje selo i grad podrazumevaju. Ipak, iako bi to lako moglo da ne bude tako, Vilijamsu polazi za rukom da društvenoistorijski kontekst ne preplavi književne izvore, već da se kroz razmišljanje o sociološkim pojavama dođe do poetički važnih mesta. Bila mi je, na primer, zanimljiva teza kako roman predstavlja zapravo formu „zajednice (sa)znanja” u kojoj je upisan kod za dešifrovanje različitih kulturnih praksi. Istorija romana stoga predstavlja povest promena „saznajnih zajednica”, koje nose sasvim različite kapacitete za shvatanje (društvenih) odnosa. I svašta se tu može pronaći – od one dobro poznate distinckije između grada kao prostora dekadencije i ozdravljujućeg sela, preko toga kako su izolacija i klasni odnosi povezani sa konstituisanjem pejzaža i koncepta „prirodne lepote” (npr. pokroviteljstvo nekog veleposednika 18. veka uslovljava umetničku percepciju njegovih sužnjih umetnika), sve do preplitanja seoskog i gradskog u kontekstu uspostavljanja jednog globalnog ekosistema. Usput Vilijams objašnjava kako je problem zemljoposedništva ključan za englesku istoriju (kao i da je u 18. veku pola obradivog zemljišta u Engleskoj imalo samo 5000 porodica!), analizira društvenu strukturu komšiluka u romanima Džejn Ostin, piše kako je Vordsvort opevao grad pre uobičajene buke radnog dana – ali i pre zagađenja; izdvaja osobenosti Balzakovog, Bodlerovog i Dikensovog (g)rada, ili koncept „zlatnog doba” povezuje sa feudalizmom i „selektivnošću pastorale”. Piše Vilijams i o Džojsu, gde konstatuje da je sam jezik (polifonija grada) saznajna zajednica za sebe – i dok u „Uliksu“ vidi njen klimaks, u „Fineganovom bdenju“ pronalazi njen pad.

Ovo je, svezajedno, veoma važna knjiga, gde, iako su neka tvrđenja mogla da budu razrađenija, u celini predstavljaju dragocen poduhvat dinamičnijeg i celovitijeg sagledavanja književnosti i kulture u celini. S tim u vezi nimalo nije slučajno što je Vilijamsov najbolji učenik upravo Teri Iglton, a obojica su značajno obojili način na koji mislimo kulturu.
Još je više Vilijamsovih posrednih nastavljača – od ekokritike do književne geografije Franka Moretija.

[Simon Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

"ALL I KNOW IS I HAD A COW AND PARLIAMENT TOOK IT AWAY FROM ME" - A COUNTRYMAN SPEAKING OF ENCLOSURE

It was with a little trepidation that I began to read the Marxist critic Raymond Williams 35 year old book "The Country And The City". I need not have been worried.

Its obvious that Williams, who was born in a Welsh border village, has a keen knowledge of the reality of countryside grounded in experience. He has usefully augmented this and expanded into other times and places during a life time of city bound study. It is this accumulated knowledge of the literature and reality of country and city as well as the relationship between the two over time that make this an interesting read.

The majority of the book focuses on the country-side of the title, intelligent readings of the literature of the time against the reality of Britain's developing capitalist agricultural, the enclosure of the commons and depopulation. He never loses sight of the fact that the country is lived in and worked by people and in what context this occurs. This provides the framework for a thoughtful consideration of what would have been contemporary literature through the ages: what is written and what is not written, and how the various authors see the country. Initially much of the material is poetry and drama, I regrettably have never had much of a head for poetry but Williams makes such poets as Oliver Goldsmith, William Wordsworth and John Clare explicable. As time progresses more of the material considered is in prose: William Cobbet, Jane Austen, George Elliot, Thomas Hardy, Lewis Grassic Gibbon for example.

All this is related to developments in the City, which Williams sees as being connected to the countryside. The reality of life in the city is likewise related to the literature of the times, his consideration of Dickens made me want to re-read at least some of his works.

The book ends with an extended essay on the relationship between city and countryside, and steps back to take a global view which is still immensely relevant. There is also thoughts on the future as seen from when the book was written (1973), these unfortunately are still food for thought. Overall the book is a fascinating read, though difficult at times (I had to re-read paragraphs on a few occasions) I found it worth the effort. Well recommended, especially for members of the Countryside Alliance (do they still exist?).

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great mix of literary criticism - his readings of G. Eliot and Dickens are particularly impressive - history and political agitation. Williams starts with a discussion of the pastoral mode, which is valuable in itself. But the book really gets humming when he hits the early moderns, and starts to track the different ways that pastoral themes have been used and abused by people in different times and classes. This is in the middle portion of the book. The last few chapters finally started to get a bit too preachy. Now, I don't mind some preachiness about poverty and oppression and so on, since that's always nice to have. But preachiness about the 'decadent,' 'weak' tradition of 'country house' writing, which somewhat ambivalently includes Henry James, Ivy-Compton Burnett and, no doubt, Elizabeth Bowen is unnecessarily old-Marxisty. As the book draws to a close, you get the impression that Williams prefers Hardy to James, not because of any literary qualities, but because Hardy writes about threshing machines and grew up in the lower middle classes, while James writes about princesses and was a bit of a Brahmin. Now that may all be true, but then you're making judgment about who's the better political sociologist. And to turn around and say the real heirs of Austen and so on are detective story writers is more than bit whack. There's not much doubt that detective novels are the most conservative literary form in existence, Raymond. Too bad. Otherwise, 5 stars for great writing, avoiding theory b.s., and caring about books.

[Alex Laser · Rating 4 out of 5]

A particularly relevant book in the era of the Trump presidency. Williams argues effectively that "country" and "city" are not fixed archetypes so much as social constructs whose development is directly related to the growth of capitalism as a dominant economic mode. Cities are seen today as the bastions of capitalism. But Williams argues that capitalism was first developed and mastered in the country beginning among the aristocratic landowning class of the 16th century. The city was inextricably linked to this process as the center of trade and banking which these landowners depended on to consolidate wealth. As populations exploded as a result and necessity to fuel industrialized labor, the city transformed from a place of "civilized social transitions" of the wealthy to a den of overcrowded squalor in the popular and literary mindset. Consequently, the shrinking country became a nostalgic retreat of the bourgeois class and a location of travel to be enjoyed and observed by the wealthy.

In other words, the division that we are used to today (country = backwards but beautiful/city = progressive but ugly) is not actually a permanent reality but a constructed reality of the dominant landowning class. The meanings of both have shifted to serve the dominant narratives most useful to the ruling class at the time.

Why this seems particularly relevant to me in the Trump era is due to the exploitation of this division yet again by the Republicans and most shamefully by Trump. The Republicans have convinced rural populations that reality is black and white. They've flattered rural populations with an image of their own superior and unadulterated moral simplicity compared to the corruption of the city folk. They've cast the cities as dens of filth both moral and physical, dominated by elite intellectuals who disregard the opinions of so-called bumpkins. And are they wrong? Or have America's intellectual elites not long disregarded and ignored the plight of the rural poor for decades, looking only to the plight of the urban proletariat as in need of redemption.

Trump's stroke of genius (if you can call it genius or just his usual "idiot savant" happenstance) is to have aligned the interests of the rural populace with those of the coal miners and dispossessed factory workers. In other words, Trump has exploited a commonality between the country and the city which has always existed but which most liberal elites have regrettably ignored. Williams proves that in fact the woes of country and city have always been the same. The process of the exploitation of the farmer is no different from the exploitation of the factory worker from the exploitation of the urban service industry worker. Trump erased the division between the country and the city and created a powerful coalition that voted against their own self-interests. Liberals if they decry this as stupidity of simple country folk and blue collar America will continue to fuel their own demise. What they need to do instead is to see the commonality of the poor across the country and the city. Exploitation is no different regardless of geographical location. Williams shows that liberals calling for a socialist revolution will continue to be deluded if they couch it in the traditional socialist terms of industrialization and development. Rather than seeking equality for the sake of making everyone a suburban/urban bourgeois citizen, we need to seriously reevaluate our relationship to the very land itself. Development and militarization are quickly spiraling out of control, and our global self-destruction is assuredly soon if we don't halt it quickly. What we need instead is a society without "progress" in the sense of continued exploitation of people and resources. We need a society of community. A society of genuine connection to nature and to each other.

The wonderful thing is that Williams shows that hope is possible. At each successive economic development that has propagated more division between country and city, there has been also an opportunity for genuine human collectivization and empathy. It's evident in writers like Dickens who saw the novel as an opportunity to remove the veil of separation that urban life had lowered over people's eyes. It's evident in writers like DH Lawrence who saw in natural and urban settings alike a chance to surrender oneself to deep emotive experiences and childlike return to wonder and awe (experiences which capitalism abhors). It's evidence in post-colonial writers like Achebe, who have reminded us that colonialism has turned third world nations into the new rural (with none of the nostalgia we apply to our own domestic country side - another division which has been gainfully exploited through anti-globalist xenophobic rhetoric).

Williams offers hope by reminding us that each development of capitalism offers choices. There's no inevitability. Rapid urbanization in the 19th century fostered artistic developments that radicalized our ability to empathize with our fellow man (novel being one of the best examples). The same urbanization fostered the unionization and collectivization (that is is now so dangerous under attack). Capitalism is a maze of successive doors. At each turn in the maze we encounter one door wide open and one door seemingly locked. If we bother to search, the key to the locked door is usually hidden in plain sight. We have to choose to see it. Perhaps the internet will be the new key to fostering empathy and collectivism (or perhaps we'll allow Facebook tribalism to continue to drag us down into petty reality show style infighting).

Williams is honest that the fight isn't easy. It's easy to be paralyzed by the apparent intransigence of humanity to reform itself. However, he reminds us that with the environmental destruction and another impending world war on the horizon, we have little choice but to try.

Literary criticism that not only changes your view of the books you read but the world around you is literary criticism of the highest caliber. Raymond Williams does not disappoint.

[Michael Meeuwis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Massive, persuasive, astonishing. A history of the figures of country and city in English literature, starting with the seventeenth century; likely to change how one reads everything from the Cavalier poets to science fiction of the 1960s.

[Thomas Doyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although it is not new that the relationship between the countryside and the city is seen as crucial to shaping human experience, Williams develops these ideas so elegantly and convincingly that it seems as if it all began with him. Tracing the changes in the understanding of the urban and the rural throughout the history of literature, through a pronounced Marxist prism, brings interesting insights into both the history of capitalism and the changing boundaries that the countryside and the city imply.

However, although this could easily not be the case, Williams manages not to overwhelm the socio-historical context with literary sources, but to arrive at poetically important places through reflection on sociological phenomena. I found interesting, for example, the thesis that the novel actually represents a form of a community of co-knowledge in which the code for deciphering different cultural practices is inscribed. The history of the novel therefore represents the history of changes in communities of knowledge, which carry completely different capacities for understanding social relations. And there is a lot to find there – from the well-known distinction between the city as a space of decadence and the healing countryside, through how isolation and class relations are connected to the constitution of the landscape and the concept of “natural beauty” (for example, the patronage of an 18th-century landowner conditions the artistic perception of his slave artists), to the intertwining of the rural and the urban in the context of the establishment of a global ecosystem.

Along the way, Williams explains how the problem of landownership is crucial for English history (and that in the 18th century, half of the arable land in England was owned by just 5,000 families!), analyzes the social structure of neighborhoods in Jane Austen’s novels, writes how Wordsworth sang of the city before the usual noise of the working day – but also before pollution; highlights the peculiarities of Balzac, or connects the concept of the “golden age” with feudalism and the “selectivity of pastoralism”. Williams also writes about Joyce, where he notes that language itself is a cognitive community unto itself.

[Robert Nield · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a lot to like in this magisterial Marxist assessment of English literature of the archetypal ideas of the country and the city, especially the skewering of the nostalgia which so persistently attends an idea of the countryside and Williams's relentless fury at the conditions in which people lived and the reasons they lived in them.

To be uncharitable, some of the later chapters around the city (especially the Dickens one) are so full of bulky quotations that the argument itself seems a little threadbare. Williams tends to keep the book to England-based authors, which leads to a few jarring omissions (Burns!) of immensely pertinent work. The engagement with the eighteenth/nineteenth century poets is very dated, with some factual errors (e.g. Robert Bloomfield did not 'run away' from farm service - his uncle, the farmer he served, recognised Bloomfield wasn't physically cut out for it and his family arranged for him to apprentice as a cobbler with his brother in London) and, more importantly, the ugly habit of dividing their work into authentic and inauthentic examples of what a modern observer imagines a labouring-class author's proper voice to be.

Such quibbles notwithstanding, I have some new ideas and want to read more books. What more can you ask for from literary criticism?

[Differengenera · Rating 3 out of 5]

a+ lit crit, not sure it's terribly useful though

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Used it for my Masters research, honestly contained everything I needed and more

[Jo]

Someone needs to make an annotated edition with all the citation info that Raymond Williams doesn’t include 😭😭

[annabel · Rating 3 out of 5]

sellel raamatul oli yks suur jama küljes ainult mu jaoks… see oleks pidanud olema sarnane essee nagu Orwelli “Politics and the English Language”, mitte 300lk pikkune raamat

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

An effective and even virtuosic application of Marxist cultural analysis. Williams scrutinizes a privileged tradition of representing country and city alike in English literature. He's interested in the images of the country and the city that dominate our cultural imagination. Many of these--from the country-house poems of Early Modern England, where fish jump cheerfully into nets and stags offer themselves up with perverse altruism, to the sentimental idealizations of pastoral verse--gloss over the arduous labor expended in working the land and farming. Williams is interested in the way representations of the country have obfuscated the exploitative class dynamics that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries with the onset of agrarian capitalism and land enclosures. By recuperating the voices of working-class and farming poets, Williams foregrounds a way of looking at country life (as exploitative and harsh) that is suppressed by the hegemonic and conventional notions of the country. He's interested, too, in the way idealized images of the country and pastural life get manipulated in urban advertisements to reinforce strategic notions of the country that serve capitalism.

[Shane Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

alteration of landscape, alteration of seeing. inclusion of labor, inclusion of work, and of working men/women (87)

There is so much here. a dialectical imagination perhaps at its finest expression. The longstanding imagery and associations are explored...

It's concerned with British history and literary criticism but its applications could be much wider as a way of seeing developmental relationships between country and city. This concerns concepts of Nature, landscape, and structures of feeling

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astute formulation of the translation of the pastoral into Modernity. Readable and believable, even after fifty years.

[Ed Osborne · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best non fiction book I’ve read, in terms of both its ambition and its execution. One of the few books I’ve read that changed the way I look at the world around me - I mean my actual physical surroundings - in terms of its place in history and the role it plays in reinforcing a social order.

Williams is a Marxist and this is an incredible work of historical materialism that veers from literature to historical documents and then to sociology, always with a view on asking important questions about where social power comes from and is shaped, and never settling for an easy answer.

I’m being light on details of what is actually discussed in the book, because I can’t ever condense all that Williams covers about the country, city, their geneses and relationship, into a couple of paragraphs. The best thing I can do is encourage everyone to read it, especially if you 1: like books (especially classic literature and poetry) and 2: don’t like capitalism.

Reading some literary criticism it seems hard to notice a purpose to what’s being written; some excellent historical scholarship and textual analysis just seems sort of… pointless. Why do we need to know, apart from as an exercise in research? This isn’t that. Williams has reminded me why people still write literary criticism, and why the discipline is important. I never knew I could learn so much about the history and lives of townsfolk from 300 years ago I had never met through an amalgamation of poetry, fiction and drama, but here I am.

He even touches briefly on the relevance of British imperialism and colonial exploitation to his analysis at the end of the work, which gives a lot more value to his analyses and really demonstrates his desire for a comprehensive questioning of capitalist power in all its forms.

Personal favourites are his chapters on Austen and (especially) on Eliot, but the whole thing is worth reading for the full picture. Easy 5 stars

[Frobisher Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was not expecting this book to be as dense and detailed as it is. A journey through the history of English literature pointed at the twin foci of the Countryside and the City, this book is exceptional in its ability to weave literary criticism and historical analysis together, while never losing sight for long of sociological and even philosophical issues that surround these topics. Ostensibly from a Marxist perspective, however, the insights the author arrives at however are not only materialist, but also concerning how patterns of ideas reinforce each other and conflict or inform reality through time.

That said, I think it has almost no business being so long and dense! It certainly qualifies as one of those "if you only read one book about ..." types of books. It is an important cornerstone in what is sometimes called "Rural and urban studies," but it is not merely an introduction, it is a whole course in English lit. My biggest gripe is the frequent occurrence of page-long paragraphs, especially for the edition I read, which had relatively small print.

[River C. J. Ander Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thirteen months, I took that much of time finishing reading this marvelous book. So it is with a twinge of regret that I should admit that I do not have any idea regarding what was discussed in earlier chapters anymore. But on second thought, it probably is because the early chapters are too difficult to read, personally speaking. I don't think I have the capacity to appreciate that much of poetry, let alone ones written in "old" English. Then, what gives me the courage to rate this book (along with the reading experience itself) highly with full stars? I can only say that this particular book reminds me of many things, experiences that I almost forget, reminiscences of past and present (and most probably prospective, here in this country I live). In short, similarities between my immediate angst and Williams's views and opinions in his writing are brought forward in front of me vividly, which, to anyone who is a reader, should be invaluable.

[Luciano Filho]

Uma profunda e erudita reflexão sobre o campo e a cidade na literatura e na história. Com sua verve clássica e, ao mesmo tempo contemporânea, R. Williams consegue nos transportar de uma atmosfera a outra - do campo e da cidade - sem perder a leveza, ainda quando nos provoca a pensar sobre os grandes dramas humanos que constituem os fios dessa história.

[Sølvi Goard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really struggled with this for the first two thirds due to the intense literary aspect, which was not what I was expecting. But I am glad I persevered because the final third is golden. I think for any of us invested in building a new social and ecological land justice, and in undermining the alienation of people to land in both city and country, this is useful.

[Frankie]

Lofty benchmark for critical prose 🥰 and lofty benchmark for Hardy criticism. “The losses are real and heartbreaking because the desires were real, the shared work was real, the unsatisfied impulses were real … People choose wrongly but under terrible pressures: under the confusions of class, under its misunderstandings, under the calculated rejections of a divided separating world.”

[Ashley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not badly written, offers good information - I just didn't care and would have never chosen to read this if not for school.

[映月 刘 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book reminds me of updating my narratives on grassland management.

[Alf Bojórquez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una gran lector, los capítulos sobre H.G. Wells y William Morris son muy hermosos. De los lectores más atentos y sensibles de la crítica literaria marxista.

[Otillaf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply put, a great book and a great exercise of criticism

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never tire of this book and must have re-read it umpteen times. It's still as valid as ever, possibly ever more. Highly recommended

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

No supero lo original que és aquest llibre.

[Zackary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This reminded me a lot of The Machine in the Garden. The key difference being that this book was engaging and spoke, at least to an extent, of pressing socio-economic concerns.

[Sergio Maduro]

Uma, entre tantas ideias sensacionais do livro, é a de que o acelerado processo inglês de urbanização deixou por muito tempo marcas de ruralidade na cultura, que o autor vai identificando

[Sofía Polar · Rating 3 out of 5]

long but not in a good way; detailed but not in a good way

[Cyprien Saito · Rating 5 out of 5]

The city is the first human settlement in Genesis. For a student like Raymond Williams, university library might be such a kind of human settlements. Considerably reckoned phase of literature and literary criticism is exposed in his writing style.