Green Unpleasant Land Creative Responses to Rural England's Colonial Connections

Green Unpleasant Land explores the countryside’s repressed colonial past and demonstrates its importance as a source of ideas about Englishness. The book presents historical evidence to show that rural England was a place of conflict and global expansion. It also examines four centuries of literary response to explore how race, class, and gender have both created and deconstructed England’s pastoral mythologies. In particular, the book argues that Black and British Asian writers have challenged narrow, nostalgic views of rural England but also expressed attachment to English landscapes and the natural world.

Professor Corinne Fowler is a research expert at the University of Leicester, and is Director of Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted. Professor Fowler is an expert in the legacies of colonialism and postcolonialism to literature, heritage and representations of British history. She co-founded and led the Centre for New Writing for 6 years, where she bought together writers and researchers to commission over 100 creative works.