>Later, in a book I used for sociology of family--can't recall now
>and it's packed away at the mo'--the author made the point (and
>illustrated with evidence) that quite a bit of Western literature is
>littered with the "olden daze" theme.
Raymond Williams has a nice chapter trope in English poetry on this in The Country and the City - it goes back to Piers Plowman. Here's my version of it from After the New Economy.
Doug
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Golden Age myths belong to literature, not nonfictions, but even there they vanish on close inspection. As Raymond Williams tells it in The Country and the City, F. R. Leavis' circle in the 1930s lamented the loss of the "organic community" of the turn of the century; just before that century turn, Hardy wrote of the lost England of the 1830s; the 1830s had Cobbett writing of the paradise of the 1770s...on back to Piers Plowman. In the Golden Age mode, says Williams, a feudal order is idealized as more "natural"; sure enough, in one of the small sessions at the IFG's 1995 conference, one of the panelists described the Middle Ages as a time of "real community." But, for "the uncountable thousands who grew crops and reared beasts only to be looted and burned and led away with tied wrists, this economy, even at peace, was an order of exploitation of a most thoroughgoing kind: a property in men as well as land; a reduction of most men to working animals, tied by forced tribute, forced labour, or 'bought and sold like beasts....'" (Williams 1973, chap. 4). Against this, a community-undermining capitalism can feel almost like a breath of fresh air. Almost.