Raymond Williams, Norman Nicholson, and rural modernity

Frayn, Andrew

Abstract

This paper reads the Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson’s writings about the impact of deindustrialisation on rural communities through the lens of Raymond Williams’s theorisation of the rural in modernity – notably The Country and the City, but also taking into account his work on D.H. Lawrence, William Cobbett and John Clare, and Williams’s own creative work such as Border Country and the play A Letter from the Country. Born in 1914 and 1921 respectively, Nicholson and Williams are men of essentially the same generation: their formative years came in the interwar period; their adulthood was shaped by the Second World War; both grew up far from the metropolis and maintained a critical relationship with the metropolitan centre. Here, Frayn takes Williams’s The Country and the City as a foundational text for recent work on rural modernity, connecting it with recent work on the ‘edgelands’ and deindustrialisation. He argues that Nicholson’s writing constitutes an exemplary rural modernism, particularly his poems that chart the rise and fall of extractive industries in western Cumbria, notably the ironworks in his home town of Millom, which closed in 1968. Frayn concludes by reflecting on the enduring impact of rural deindustrialisation in the twenty-first century, both in a Cumbria beyond the Lake District, and a south Wales beyond the Brecon Beacons.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Raymond Williams @ 100: A Centenary Conference
• Start Date: Apr 22, 2022
• End Date: Apr 23, 2022
• Deposit Date: Apr 26, 2023
• Related Public URLs: https://raymondwilliams.co.uk/annual-conference/