Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association

This essay begins with Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City to consider the context of literary place-production and to analyze a novel about tourism development in our neoliberal moment. In focusing on contemporary place-production at the state level, both city and country are subject to shifts in their cultural significance, dictated by a service-centered tourist economy: the country is sold as former somewhere or perpetual elsewhere; the city is marketed as former elsewhere or perpetual somewhere. Neoliberal markets, of course, will decide. My review of tourism studies and my analysis of Julian Barnes’ England, England reveal the complex revisions of domestic hinterlands in the pursuit of touristic profit and nationalist nostalgia. Within those revisions, the powerful tropes of country and city, elsewhere and somewhere, converge and diverge in the hybrid product of Sir Jack’s free-market fantasy land, England, England.