Agricultural Change and Rural Decline in the Deserted Village
Author : Yogesh Kumari Madhukar
Abstract :
This study will investigate the role that agricultural reforms had in the rural communities' demise in 18th-century England, as shown in Goldsmith's The Deserted Village. A pastoral elegy The Deserted Village, penned by an Anglo-Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, is a social commentary in which Goldsmith criticises urban moral decay, materialism, landscape gardening, rural depopulation, avarice, and the chase of profit through foreign trade. As human society transitions from an agrarian to an urban-industrial economy and then to a knowledge economy, rural decline is an unavoidable process. The village of Auburn, the narrator's deteriorating boyhood home, serves as the poem's dominant image and contains 430 lines. Due to regulations of enclosure act that encouraged enclosure, aristocracy sought to increase the size of their expansive estates by purchasing formerly owned by tiny private farmers. The villagers leave the village for the dismal urban life in England or America since they don't want to work for the landlords. It would look at how the village is portrayed in the poem, the effects of social and economic development on the neighbourhood, and how education contributed to the area's collapse. The paper would also explore The Deserted Village's influence on succeeding works and compare it to other literary works published at the same period. The comparative and analytical research methods would be used in this paper to fulfil its motif of revealing agricultural changes and their role in rural emigration and desolation in The Deserted Village.
Keywords :
The deserted village, agriculture reform, rural depopulation, rural decline, emigration, enclosure act etc.
