The Writing of Rural England, 1500-1800

The Writing of Rural England 1500-1800 documents and contextualizes the conflicting representations of rural life during a crucial period of social, economic and cultural change. It highlights the dialogues and tensions between agriculture and aesthetics, economics and morality, men and women, leisure and labour. By drawing on both canonical and marginal texts, it argues that early-modern writing not only reflected but played a part in constructing the cultural meanings of the English countryside with which we continue to live.

STEPHEN BENDING is the co-editor of Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling and of Tracing Architectures, c. 1700-1840. He has published numerous articles on eighteenth-century gardens and landscape, and is currently working on a study of women gardeners in the eighteenth century. He is a lecturer at the University of Southampton.

ANDREW MCRAE is the author of God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500-1660 (1996), Renaissance Drama (2003), and Satire and the Early Stuart State (2003). He has published numerous articles on literature and cultural history, and is currently writing a book on domestic travel in early modern Britain. He is a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter.