Stephen Prince (4)

_A Year in the Country_ is a blog/art/music/visual art project dealing with various aspects of British folk culture through its appearance in horror films and weird television shows from the 1970s and 1980s, and the recent "folk horror revival" and hauntology projects involving the creation of music, film, and art that both reinterprets and warps those source materials into new works. This book collects the first three years of blog entries.

Each blog entry cum essay covers some set of related works, often a set of films, television programs, music releases, or books with similar themes or that feed off one another, reworking the older material into new forms, some of which then go on to be reworked themselves.

Britain (really mostly England in these essays) has a long history of folk traditions, some stretching back to times before the various Scandinavian, Roman, French, and other invasions and colonizations, each of which brought their own stories and traditions. The imposition of Christianity led to further (often forced) reinterpretation and suppression of pagan traditions, muddling their original meanings. Add in more recent events including witchcraft trials (and executions); the introduction of various Protestant ideas; the confiscation and destruction of Catholic lands and establishments; and the clashes between different Protestant and labor movements with each other and with the political and religious establishments; Enclosure acts and resistance to them; the Civil War and its aftermath; and (although not explored here) the even more recent contributions from immigrants from various British colonies, and Britain/England has an almost bottomless well of traditions and folklore to draw on.

Prince provides a tour through this world, providing both his interpretations and the stories of other participants, and thus an annotated collection of resources and projects to explore.

The project's website is at https://ayearinthecountry.co.uk/. It is ongoing (as of this writing), and includes links to physical and digital artifacts and media produced as part of the project or by similar or related projects.… (más)