Putting together ruralities: towards a symbolic analysis of rurality in the British mass media.

摘要

In recent years, rural geography has become increasingly sensitized to the significance of rurality as a cultural construct. This paper examines the production and reception of mediated representations of rurality: that is, it focuses on senses of the rural conveyed by mass media such as television. The paper discusses claims that images of rurality can be understood as socio-spatializations. It then focuses on the rurality of British rural drama programmes, and particularly on 3 such drama series:Dangerfield, Heartbeat and Peak Practice. Drawing together a textual analysis of these programmes with research on their production and consumption, we explore the rurality produced through these television dramas, paying particular attention to the presence, and absence, of idyllic notions of the countryside. We suggest that while these programmes do enact idyllic constructions of rurality, their rurality is not simply reducible to this. We also highlight how these programmes may also enact particularsocial identities, including, but not exclusively, those of class. We argue in particular that the 3 drama series can be read as conveying, in a range of ways, senses of middle-classness. The overall argument of this paper is that the mediated ruralities of British rural drama programmes are enactments of social and spatial imaginaries, the complexity and effect of which are often ignored in their textual reduction to a middle class idyll.