Abstract

This article examines four literary texts that are strongly characterized by the negotiation of agriculture, rural spaces, and rural life. Like the local colour fiction of Thomas Hardy, they focus on specific regions: a Welsh valley and the Scottish Mearns. James L. Mitchells short stories Scenes from Scotland (1934) and Angharad Prices novel The Life of Rebecca Jones (2002) represent the rural. The analysis aims to use and strengthen the not yet particularly common concept of rural writing or, more specifically, rural criticism. The article discusses the cultural techniques and historical changes of peasant labor in four texts of the 20th and 21st century from a literary and cultural studies perspective. The focus is on literary representations of peasant labor practices and, in particular, the relationship of peasants to the soil that they cultivate under high effort. Nature has at the same time a resonant quality interweaving the peasants and their rural surroundings.