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Locating rural cosmopolitanism in long nineteenth-century British writings
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2018
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Abstract
The rural is often understood as marginalized, on the edges of cities, and rarely visible in print culture centers. What is more, the rural is typically stereotyped as marginal in terms of intelligence, sophistication, and influence. Locating Rural Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Writings, therefore, shows the inherent complexity and dignity of rural cultures and their impact on the wider world. What is more, my research recovers, both historically and spatially, how rural cultures are underrepresented in literary studies. While traditional scholarship tends to focus on how rural voices symbolize or contribute to understandings about national identity, literary studies tend to limit attention to ways that the urban-centered, industrialized nation oppresses its own agrarian rural communities. My dissertation project, therefore, contributes to this conversation by addressing the following major themes: 1).^Dismantling stereotypes of the hypermasculine industrial nation and the feminized rural region, 2). Revising how rural voices and tastes are romanticized as nationalized, homogenized ideals, and 3). Introducing new scholarship about the tensions urbanization brings to rural cultures sensibilities associated with gender and social-class. For my primary sources, I analyze major works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, as well as understudied, nontraditional texts such as cookery, gastronomical, and agricultural writings. More broadly, I examine how nineteenth-century British texts represent rural engagement with the global. Nineteenth-century British regions, both the urban and the rural, together, experienced international, cosmopolitan relationships as a result of the increased mobility that emerged from industrialization, the railway, and other means of transport.^A cosmopolitan society, in modern times, is regarded as progressive and multicultural whereas rural societies have been viewed as more traditional and culturally limited. I posit, however, that nineteenth-century rural representations are cosmopolitan, complex, and connected to cultures outside of their own supposedly fixed geographical, class, and gendered affiliations. In short, I look at the ways in which many rural representations tend to ignore local differences and rethink how these representations actually establish, however subtly, their local markers of distinction within urbanized, cosmopolitan experiences.
Contents
Subject
Subject(s)
English literature 19th century History and criticism.
Cosmopolitanism Great Britain History 19th century.
Cooking, British History 19th century.
Food habits Great Britain History 19th century.
Rural-urban relations Great Britain History 19th century.
Cross-cultural studies Great Britain.
Great Britain Rural conditions 19th century.
Great Britain History Victoria, 1837-1901.
Cosmopolitanism Great Britain History 19th century.
Cooking, British History 19th century.
Food habits Great Britain History 19th century.
Rural-urban relations Great Britain History 19th century.
Cross-cultural studies Great Britain.
Great Britain Rural conditions 19th century.
Great Britain History Victoria, 1837-1901.
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Dissertation
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1 online resource (v, 194 pages) :
Department
English