On the Image of the Country andthe CityTimothy BrennanDepartment of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and English, Univer

bstract:We know from theGrundrissethat Marx felt the division of town and countryto be as vital to political economy as the division of classes. From theManifestowe knowthat he saw this division as a homological version of the dependency created by capital-ism of global South on global North. It was, however, the cultural theorists of twenti-eth-century Marxism who internalized this geopolitical imagination and significantlydeveloped it in the form of scales and configurations of spatial meaning contained inthe concepts“city”and“country”. The structuralist revolt against history, then, as a bidto arrest historical becoming, must really be seen as a perverse analogue of earliertwentieth century Marxist innovations in the spatialization of time. Thinkers like ErnstBloch, Henri Lefebvre, and Raymond Williams, although unheralded for this aspect oftheir work, developed Marx’s nascent city/country pairing, exploring the materiality ofits metaphor. In geography, it is Neil Smith’sUneven Developmentthat follows in the foot-steps of this“classical”motif in literary and cultural theory.Keywords:the country and the city, cultural materialism, imperialism, Wes https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/anti.12186