Rurality Re-Imagined: Villagers, Farmers, Wanderers and Wild Things [Paperback]

Rurality Re-imagined is divided into four loose themed sections: villagers, farmers, wanderers, and wild things; each comprises five or six diverse chapters of varied length. In the section on villagers, rural communities are considered as assemblages and spaces of vernacularity, as dark settings for TV dramas, new wave photography, and as sites for community arts projects. The farmers section critically re-invigorates the historical fascination with peasantry and farming in the arts through essays, painting, and photography that collectively place the agency of the artist under as much scrutiny as images of agricultural space and people. Stereotypically, the word wanderers conjures images of gypsy caravans, or country ramblers, but in this section the term is stretched to include not only the traditional migrations of reindeer herds, but also that of the motorway driver, and migrations of cultural forms too, such as that of hip hop from the clubs of New York to the fields of rural Devon. In the essays and images in the wild things section, wilderness emerges as a highly contested cultural terrain far from any state of purity as it manifests itself in the behaviors of people, flora, and fauna in cultivated and uncultivated landscapes and parks.CNAgainst a backdrop of rapid urbanization, representations of rural society and experience are re-thought and re-imagined in this book by leading contemporary artists and scholars.The writers, designers and artists assembled in Rurality Re-imagined ask us to take seriously the neglected countryside, but not to simply assume that neglect and re-present familiar ideas and ideals of the rural as local in opposition to the urban as global. Through collectively reflecting on their own imaginings, experiences and thinking about rurality, and with a suitably diverse set of case studies, the contributors truly open up rural space for readers. The books four-fold structure takes us from rural communities and farming practices to l#§