Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
The concept of the division between country and city has been of interest to cultural critics since the beginning of urban experience. Perhaps the most complete history of this binary is the landmark work The Country and the City (1973) by Raymond Williams. In this work, Williams attempts to thoroughly document this dynamic split throughout the history of British literature. Williams traces the way in which the country and the city have been portrayed as existing across a radical cleavage and the influence of industrial capitalism on the ideological binary at play in this deployment. Remarking on the divide, Williams writes, "On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation" (1). Williams examines this myth almost from the origins of English literary output up through the twentieth century, showing the way in which the pastoral and a displaced form of life are almost constantly ideologically reflected upon at any given moment in British literary history.
Repository Citation
McKee, Adam. "Eternal Return and the City/Country Dynamic in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 14, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1–14. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol14/iss3/15