As a brilliant survey of English literature in terms of changing attitudes towards country and city, Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City reveals the shifting images and associations between these two traditional poles of life throughout the major developmental periods of English culture. Two films were inspired by or based on the book: So That You Can Live (For Shirley) by Cinema Action (see p.67) and The Country and the City by Mike Dibb. Williams’s book starts from an analysis of country-house poems in the 1600s and 1700s, and he contrasts these poems, full of praise for these great houses, with the actual damage done by their owners to the countryside. The film explores contrasting ideas of country and city, challenging assumed values of the country as natural and demonstrating the labour necessary to maintain the apparent gentility of a country estate.
