Urban/Rural

This chapter examines the various tropes and representational strategies used by writers to depict urban and rural spaces and their dynamics, highlighting the constructed nature of place and the intimate relationship between history, place-making, memory, and representation. Drawing on key cultural theorists and urban geographers, most notably Walter Benjamin, George Simmel, Yi-Fu Tuan, Susan Buck-Morss, Kristin Bluemel, and Michael McCluskey, and literary texts such as Dung Kai Cheung’s Atlas: An Archaeology of an Imaginary City (1997), I discuss different imaginative and creative impulses that underlined the discursive construction of place and space. And with reference to texts published in different cultural contexts and historical moments, such as Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), George Gissing’s The Whirlpool (1897), and Shen Congwen’s The Border Town (1934), I examine not only the various manifestations of urban/rural dichotomies as invoked in literary works, but also moments when these dichotomies are unsettled or blurred. The last section of the chapter focuses on Alicia Little’s A Marriage in China (1896) and Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark (1934), exploring the ways in which the rural/urban constructs engage with questions of colonial politics, resistance, and the ideas of home and (un)belonging.