Selling the countryside: Representations of rurality in Norway and Spain

This paper analyses how rurality is represented in two lifestyle magazines about country living: LevLandlig in Norway and Vivir en el Campo in Spain. Since material, imaginative and practised ruralities are intertwined and research indicates that representations of the rural affect residential preferences and other consumption activities, we argue that it is important to critically investigate potentially influential representations. Given that the majority of works on representations of the rural in mass media originate mainly from the United Kingdom and the United States, we aim to add the perspectives of a Scandinavian and a Mediterranean country. Furthermore, we analyse the gendering of the visions of the rural. We reveal that the ‘rural idyll’ is the main vision ‘sold’ in both magazines, and in both the same four sub-themes — ‘home’, ‘family’, ‘nature’ and ‘how to make a living in a rural area’ — stand central in the idyll. The gendering of the idyll and the meanings attached to the sub-themes vary between the Spanish and the Norwegian magazines, thus illustrating the contextual character of knowledge about rurality.