Abstract
Some of Eliot's sense for the paradoxical centrality of provincial experience is still preserved in the opening few chapters of D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913), but the absurdity of imagining there could be any true intellectual engagement in rural life becomes the central comic device of E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia series (1920-39) novels. A similar refusal to admit the compatibility of the cosmopolitan and the world of "village green preservation society" shapes the Bovaryisme of Cooper's Scenes from Provincial Life (1950; "que je m'ennuie" mutters its hero to an audience of schoolboys), the parodic exuberance of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954; the novel's senile old villain has no higher ambition than making it onto a radio program devoted to "provincial culture"), and the genteel resignation of Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop (1978).