Rural spaces’ capacity to enrich existing understandings of modernity is the founding premise of this dissertation. Through analysis of literary classics, lesser-known fictional works, and historical documents, I draw attention to four culturally and artistically significant landscapes as they have been represented in Francophone African literature. My two central contentions throughout are that consideration of non-urban spaces has the capacity to dismantle the narrow (urban) critical ontology of modernity and that space itself should be understood as a “patchwork” not as a series of binaries; whether urban-rural, local-global, or abstract-concrete. To demonstrate this, my place- based chapter structure weaves together different sections of this tapestry, beginning with [1] the City, moving to [2] the Village, then [3] the Catholic Mission, [4] Serer agricultural hinterlands, threaded together by a final chapter [5] on the railway. These sites explode the monolithic umbrella term “rural” by elucidating global "histoires croisées", watershed shifts in land and social organisation, while also underscoring resistance to and the failures of such “modern” projects. Approaching these literary representations of rurality with an eye for “ecological ambiguity” equally allows for a richer apprehension of the aesthetic complexity of the five texts to be discussed. By the conclusion of our enquiry into “rural modernity” it should be clear that modernity -like rurality- is a differentiated process, a patchwork, largely held together by the umbrella term itself. My opening chapter offers a genealogy of Francophone Afromodernity that reveals its urban biases. In doing so, I argue that three dichotomies enduringly structure normative definitions of modernity: [1] modern-traditional, [2] urban-rural, and [3] capitalist-noncapitalist. My second chapter pursues how these three “recursive” binaries filter into colonial literature about the West African countryside through a reading of the Tharaud brothers’ "La Randonnée de Samba Diouf", a novel featured on the French administrative école coloniale’s psychology syllabus. In the chapter that follows, we move to the Catholic Mission to examine the monotheistic foundations of secular, Western ideas of “nature” through analysis of Mongo Beti's "Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba". I draw attention to Beti's upending of evangelical rhetoric and biblical motifs like “Sodom and Gomorrah” and the “wilderness” in his portrayal of evangelism in the Southern Cameroonian forest. My fourth chapter explores agrarian capitalism’s hidden relation to the form and subject matter of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s “pastoral” poetry. Pivoting on the consensus among pastoral theorists that nostalgic idylls hide, and in their hiding, react to a “loss of nature”, I argue that President Senghor’s praise of the paysan serer is necessarily linked to his abolition of customary land tenure (upon which Serer social organisation rests) through "La Loi sur le Domaine National" (1964). My final chapter explores how the absent train in Ahmadou Kourouma’s "Monnè, outrages et défis" and Boubacar Boris Diop’s "Doomi Golo" transforms this “metonym of modernity” into modernity’s broken part. I contend that the train’s deferred arrival in these two novels mirrors the history of unsuccessful railway projects on the African continent and forms part of both authors’ deeper critique of the narrative structures that imbue time and history with meaning.