Introduction 13
of the ways in which rural identities are played out across international move-
ments. Leong explores how Little’s sense of Englishness, derived through an
understanding of English rurality as a signifi er of English national identity, is
challenged and diffi cult to maintain when immersed in a Chinese rural context
which subverts an English-centred narrative of rurality as idyllic.
Th e collection closes, therefore, with a perspective that takes us beyond the
borders of Britain. Leong’s essay establishes ideas about the transnational rural,
reminding us that concepts which have been discussed in this collection in rela-
tion to British rural locales also extend across nations, thus forming a dialogue
between local, national and global ruralities. Such a perspective broadens the
scope of existing studies of rurality which are predominantly local in focus, and
provides a context for further study of ruralities in relation to each other which
extend across national borders. Th e assertion of national identity is oft en an
implicit association throughout nineteenth-century conceptualizations of rural-
ity. As Ebbatson and others in this collection identify, from the 1840s to 1920s
landscape formed an important site for the location of national identity, provid-
ing a source of continuity in a time of change and so coming to be representative
of a quintessential Englishness within the context of an expanding project of
Empire.^41 Th is dominant conceptualization of landscape and identity is recog-
nized and also resisted by a number of the chapters in this collection through
the diversifi cation and nuancing of both rural representations and British and
English identities. Th e collection provides location-centred examples of the way
in which rural locations can disrupt and question dominant understandings of
English and British identities, both individually and in relation to one another –
a perspective which is perhaps more accessible from within the current positive
devolutionary political climate which is enacting within governance a recogni-
tion of diff erence within Britain.
Th e movement into rural spaces beyond British borders, represented here by
China and South America, further contributes to and extends these debates by
opening up an indicative exploration of the local-global negotiations involved in
rural identities. In line with recent scholarship on the signifi cance of Victorian
Britain’s colonial project to the construct of national identity, these essays demon-
strate that the off shore enactment of British rural identity plays an important role
in the constitution of national identities within Britain, but also demonstrate how
rural environments abroad off er opportunities for the exploration of diff erent
gendered codes, and consequently the interrogation of core ideas of Englishness
and Britishness.^42 Th is initiates dialogue about the ‘transference’ of British and
English identities abroad, and also therefore informs understanding about how
the ideolog y of rural landscape has been a key site of national identity formation,
such that its movement overseas could operate in the relocation of Britishness.
Th e transnational rural represents an important new direction for the study
of rurality, and is just one area signalled by this collection that holds much