Reading, writing, and the rural

Multifarious changes have made it increasingly difficult to make sense of the rural. This paper reviews the attempts of a new volume entitled Writing the Rural to adapt to these circumstances. The approaches of the bookʹs five authors vary widely and occasion friction and instability as often as they complement one another. David Matless investigates the rural as an object written and read about in a variety of ways, discerning themes of boundary, frontier, and meaning which concern not only the spatial aspects of the rural but also the historical. This palimpsest identity is explored further by Martin Phillips, who contextualizes the rural with regard to the interplay of public, private, official unofficial, and intermediate social spaces. His efforts to widen the analytical lens by doing so employ notions of claims to validity and the possibility of their evaluation found in the contentious but engaging perspectives on ‘communicative action’ developed by Jürgen Habermas. By contrast, Nigel Thriftʹs chapter concludes that insofar as boundaries between human, nature, and machine are increasingly transgressed, interpretation of the rural is challenged. Marcus Doel goes further, refusing the urge to consider analysis as capable of making any complete statement about the rural. Nonetheless, Paul Cloke insists on not discounting the multiplicity of cultural expectations and competences which ‘crisscross’ the exercise of power in rural Britain, autobiographically recognizing especially the psychosocial particularities of the scholar engaged in the production of an account of it.