![]() ![]() “The book sets out to explore the connections between historical studies and imaginative literary attempts to rethink English rurality. The legacy of empire is expressed by potent language, literary culture and lasting ideas, not least about the countryside. This is a shared history: Britons' ancestors either profited from empire or were impoverished by it. Fowler, who herself comes from a family of slave-owners, argues that Britain's cultural and economic legacy is not simply expressed by chinoiserie, statues, monuments, galleries, warehouses and stately homes. All that has changed.”Ĭombining essays, poems and stories, the book details the colonial links of country houses, moorlands, woodlands, village pubs and graveyards. Nor was the empire seen as having much to do with enclosure, rural poverty or rural industry. ![]() The countryside was not, until recently, considered to reveal much about the British empire. ![]() For a long time now, historians, social geographers and archaeologists have recognised that English rural landscapes are readable, showing up such things as Bronze Age forts and Roman roads. “Historical and literary ideas about the countryside have shifted significantly in the last three decades. Corinne Fowler explores the repressed history of rural England's links to transatlantic enslavement and the East India Company. In Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England's Colonial Connections (PeePal Tree Press, 2021), Dr. ![]()
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