Oliver Goldsmith - The Deserted Village

Question 1

Oliver Goldsmith - The Deserted Village

Contexts

Answer 1

• “Sweet Auburn”
• A fictional English town, constructed out of the collective memory of the English past
• A village that has been flattened, taken over by an ‘improving’ landowner (re: the Enclosure Acts)
• Landowner has swallowed up the village, has re-shaped the land to suit his personal, solitary, luxurious pursuits
• Note: none of Timon’s ‘charitable vanity’ here, no movement towards the reconciliation offered by concordia discors

Question 2

Oliver Goldsmith - The Deserted Village

Sensibility

Answer 2

• “susceptibility to tender feelings”
• Feeling another’s pain ‘inwardly’, to feel empathy
• Closely connected to growing awareness of the “interiority”, to “feelings” as a challenge to an empirical worldview
  ‘Feelings,’ interiority, & emotionality in the older view are lowly, are affiliated with self-interest, with self-display, with a self too obsessed with itself
• Men of sensibility: men who demonstrate this capacity
• Literature of sensibility: works that depict characters with such capacity &/or which elicit a similar response in the reader

Question 3

Oliver Goldsmith - The Deserted Village

Form

Answer 3

Heroic couplets
Pastoral

Question 4

Oliver Goldsmith - The Deserted Village

The Pastoral

Answer 4

• Origins: the “ecologue,” Theocritus & Virgil
• Romanticizes the lives & innocence of country people
• Conventions: shepherds & shepherdesses, sheep, a refined rustic dialect
• Key terms: idealization, prelapsarian/paradisal, ‘golden age,’ nostalgia, commerce, primitivism
• Key narratives: unrequited love, the merits of country life, the corruption of urban life
• While the mode becomes obsolete over time, its basic impulses & tropes (country vs urban, nostalgia, anti-commerce, a ‘lost golden age’) are alive & well

Question 5

Oliver Goldsmith - The Deserted Village

Points to talk about:

Answer 5

• The status of Britain’s social order
• Women’s role in Britain’s social order
• The poor’s role Britain’s social order
• The reading of ‘places’ & ‘spaces’(landscape poetry)
• The relationship between poetry& the social order

Question 6

Oliver Goldsmith - The Deserted Village

Summary - Part One

Answer 6

• Pope: poet surveys the landscape, confirms order, affirms the coherence of “place” (landscape) & “place” (the social order, each person’s ‘place’ in society)
• Leapor, Gray, Goldsmith: all unable to make this move, to find that confirmation or affirmation in the landscape; literal ‘place’ & metaphorical ‘place’ don’t cohere
• Like Leapor, he can find no evidence that old order is still in effect
• Unlike Leapor, he is much more vocal about his concerns with what is moving in to replace it

Question 7

Oliver Goldsmith - The Deserted Village

Summary - Part Two

Answer 7

• Traces the death of community
• Also traces the exile of poetry & the order it ostensibly sustained, the death of public poetry & the public poet
• Forecasts a world of individuals ruled by money & self-interest, cut off from any sense of community
• Sees (empty) “space” displacing “place”—that is, the collapse of the harmony between the “land” and the “social place” of the classes in the old social order