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Caravans and Slide Shows: Rural Modernism in A Canterbury Tale

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Steve Jones
Steve Jones
Affiliation:
Faculty of Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK.
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Abstract

This essay uses the film A Canterbury Tale (The Archers, 1944) to consider the relationship between the countryside and modernity in English culture during the 1930s and 1940s. While previous analyses have argued that A Canterbury Tale film is unambiguously conservative, this paper adopts a Gramscian framework to suggest that its conservatism is intimately bound up with an emergent, modernising structure of feeling. The paper therefore studies those scenes in which the serene rurality of the narrative engages in a visual and aural dialogue with the modern world. The paper argues that three motifs in the film are particularly meaningful: the development of unexpected class and gender inflections in the concept of pilgrimage, the detachment of America from its status as a signifier of ‘bad’ modernity in the English countryside, and the incorporation of the cinematic into the rural.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , October 2001 , pp. 211 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2001

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