Page 112 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

Unit 14: The Eighteenth Century-Approach/Transition Towards Romanticism (Decline of Novel, Agricultural ...........

greatest of the Modernists, died in 1941. And it seemed that a great era had come to an end with Notes
them. Thereafter is a perceptible decline in the British novel. The post-Ulysses novel lacks, what
Karl Calls, “the moral urgency of a Conrad, the verbal gifts and wit of a Joyce, the vitality and all-
consuming obsession of a Lawrence.’’
On the whole, there has been less of experiment and innovation in the post-1950 English novel and
more and. more of parochialization and what is called “Little Englandism” Lacking the force and
originality of their great Modern predecessors, the English novelists of recent years sometimes
look like feeble imitators of the giants gone by. “One common characteristic” of most novelists of
recent years is, in Karl’s words, “their inability to deepen and develop with time. When Elizabeth
Bovven, for example, experiments in The Heat of the Day, she does little more than what Virginia
Woolf had tried in Mrs Dalloway fifteen years earlier. When Joyce Gary in The Horse’s Mouth and
elsewhere tampers with language, he barely scrapes the surface of what Joyce attempted with
words. When Durrell talks about love in his Alexandria Quartet, he points towards but hardly
reaches Lawrence’s examination of love. When Graham Green uses moral issues without a religious
frame of reference, he is dealing with a subject that many nineteenth-century novelists wrote
about extensively and with greater range.”

14.2 Agricultural Revolution
Between the eighth century and the eighteenth, the tools of farming basically stayed the same and
few advancements in technology were made.
The farmers of George Washington's day had no better tools than had the farmers of Julius
Caesar's day; in fact, early Roman plows were superior to those in general use in America eighteen
centuries later.

What was the Agricultural Revolution?

The agricultural revolution was a period of agricultural development between the 18th century and
the end of the 19th century, which saw a massive and rapid increase in agricultural productivity and
vast improvements in farm technology.
Listed below are many of the inventions that were created or greatly improved during the agricultural
revolution.

Plow and Moldboard
By definition a plow (also spelled plough) is a farm tool with one or more heavy blades that breaks
the soil and cut a furrow (small ditch) for sowing seeds. A moldboard is the wedge formed by the
curved part of a steel plow blade that turns the furrow.

Task Write short note on agricultural revolution.

History of Plows
Seed drills sow seeds, before drills were invented seeding was done by hand. The basic ideas in drills
for seeding small grains were successfully developed in Great Britain, and many British drills were
sold in the United States before one was manufactured in the States. American manufacture of these
drills began about 1840. Seed planters for corn came somewhat later, as machines to plant wheat
successfully were unsuited for corn planting. In 1701, Jethro Tull invented his seed drill and is
perhaps the best known inventor of a mechanical planter.

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