Though major studies of literary modernism offer varying responses to the question ‘When was modernism?’ they answer in one voice to the sequitur ‘Where was modernism?’ Raymond Williams's 1989 The Politics of Modernism confirmed the critical standard set by such landmarks as Marshall Berman's 1982 All that is Solid Melts into Air by treating location as a settled issue. Though the title of Williams's chapter ‘Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism’ does not rule out the possibility that modernism might have emerged from other positions, the opening sentence certifies that debate on the issue is closed. Williams writes, ‘It is now clear that there are decisive links between the practices and ideas of the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century and the specific conditions and relationships of the twentieth-century metropolis’ (Politics 37).

One might have expected such prominent fictions as Sons and Lovers and Brideshead Revisited to check the critical propagation of the ‘metropolitan modernism’ thesis. That they have not, I hypothesize, can be traced to our sense that country writing is modernism in a minor key, a body of work that pales in comparison to the urban literature at the canon's core. That we persist in thus dividing the field signals an assumption that a stark opposition between rural and urban remains an organizing principle in the twentieth century.