Chapter 4 - Twentieth-Century Georgic and Agricultural Technology

Summary

This chapter argues that the way in which authors of both fiction and non-fiction wrote how agriculture changed around the years of the Second World War. For the first fifty years of the century the extent and popularity of georgic writing was sufficient for the cultural significance of the countryside to outweigh its economic importance. However, those works that dealt seriously with farming tended to emphasise its problems, and mostly described a technology that had changed little since the nineteenth century. During and just after the Second World War farming memoirs in particular became far more celebratory of technical change, but there were no serious novelists, and not many memoirists, to commemorate the dramatic technical changes that transformed agriculture in the second half of the twentieth century in the way that writers such as Adrian Bell and A. G. Street had portrayed the pre-war years.