Charles Dickens

This article explores how English novels have represented the tension between urban and rural life from the eighteenth century to the present. Through major writers such as Defoe, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Woolf, and Zadie Smith, it shows how city and countryside function as powerful symbols of modernity, tradition, class, identity, and change. It also connects these literary patterns to critical approaches such as Marxism, ecocriticism, postcolonial criticism, and spatial theory, making the discussion useful for both students and scholars of English literature.