The Country and the City

The Country and the City is a book of cultural analysis by Raymond Williams first published in 1973. It analyses cultural concepts of the country and the city as expressed through literature from the middle ages to the present day, and especially the association of the country with innocence, virtue, and foolishness, and of the city with vice, learning, and sophistication. The book challenges simplistic ideas of rural and urban, setting literary developments in the context of agricultural and industrial history, "from the dawn of English agrarian capitalism in the late Middle Ages to the global anti-colonial revolutions of the 1950s and '60s". It argues that there has never been a sharp division between the country and the city, deconstructing the idea of capitalism as an external force that destroyed an idyllic rural way of life.