Laurence Sterne

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Laurence Sterne, detail of an oil painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1760; in the National Portrait … (credit: National Portrait Gallery, London)

(born Nov. 24, 1713, Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ire. — died March 18, 1768, London, Eng.) English novelist and humorist. Sterne was a clergyman in York for many years before his talents became apparent when he wrote a Swiftian satire in support of his dean in a church squabble. Turning his parishes over to a curate, he began to write Tristram Shandy (1759 – 67), an experimental novel issued in nine parts in which the story is subordinate to its narrator's free associations and digressions. It is considered one of the most important ancestors of psychological and stream of consciousness fiction. Long afflicted with tuberculosis, Sterne fled the damp air of England and undertook the travels that inspired his unfinished Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), a comic novel that defies conventional expectations of a travel book.

For more information on Laurence Sterne, visit Britannica.com.

The British novelist Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) produced only two works of fiction, but he ranks as one of the major novelists of the 18th century because of his experiments with the structure and organization of the novel.

The English novel came of age in the 18th century. Daniel Defoe had contributed realistic detail in the 1720s; Samuel Richardson had showed the dramatic intensity inherent in the epistolary novel; Henry Fielding had combined the satirical portrayal of contemporary manners with elaborate and carefully worked-out plots. Laurence Sterne, however, published the single most idiosyncratic novel of the century, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760-1767). The apparent plotlessness of Tristram Shandy, the endless digressions and wordplay, and the use of the narrator's psychological consciousness as the governing structure in the novel make Sterne unique among the early masters of the English novel and suggest a tie to the stream-of-consciousness novelists who appeared later.

Biography and Early Work

Sterne was born in Clonmel, Ireland, on Nov. 24, 1713, the son of an English army officer, Roger Sterne, and an Irish mother, Agnes. After spending his early years moving about with his father's regiment, he attended school in Yorkshire from 1723 to 1731. Sterne received a bachelor of arts degree from Jesus College, Cambridge, took orders in 1737, and in 1738 became the vicar at Sutton-in-the-Forest, near York, the first of several benefices in and near York that he held. His marriage to Elizabeth Lumley in 1741 proved unhappy.

In 1743 Sterne published his first verses, "The Unknown World, Verses Occasioned by Hearing a Pass-Bell," in the Gentleman's Magazine. But neither his verses nor his second work, A Political Romance (1759), later called The History of a Good Warm Watch, a work that had grown out of a quarrel with fellow clerics, had prepared the English reading audience for the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, which were published early in 1760.

The enormous popularity of Sterne's unusual novel quickly made him a celebrity and gave him social access to the great houses of London and Bath. In 1762 the consumption that plagued his entire life forced him to abandon London society and to seek better health in France. During the last winter before his death, Sterne readied his A Sentimental Journey for the press and carried on a curious platonic affair with Mrs. Eliza Draper, the wife of a Bombay official in the East India Company. Sterne's letters to Mrs. Draper were collected in the Journal to Eliza.

Sterne's irascibility and bawdy humor were well known to his congregations and to the English public. His local reputation around York was based, at least in part, on his eccentric dress and habits, his mordant wit, and his fund of indecorous anecdotes. It is said that he preached sermons on brotherly love with unusual rancor and ill temper. He died in London on March 18, 1768.

Tristram Shandy

With the London publication of volumes 1 and 2 of Tristram Shandy on Jan. 1, 1760, Sterne was launched as a successful author. There were baffled readers, bored readers, and indignant readers, but as Sterne observed, even those who condemned the book bought it. Samuel Richardson found the work "too gross to be inflaming," and Horace Mann noted: "I don't understand it. It was probably the intention that nobody should." Within a few months, Sterne had become a literary lion in London. He admitted that he intended to publish additional volumes as part of the novel "as long as I live, 'tis, in fact, my hobbyhorse." Sterne published volumes 3-6 in 1761; volumes 7 and 8 appeared in 1765; and in 1767, not long before Sterne's death, volume 9 appeared. Although Dr. Samuel Johnson observed of Sterne's novel that "nothing odd will do long," it has survived both neglect and the attacks of critics, and it continues to please, puzzle, and attract more readers than any other 18th-century English novel.

The apparently chaotic structure and puzzling chronology of Tristram Shandy are easily clarified. For example, Tristram is born on Nov. 5, 1718; attends Jesus College, Cambridge; and begins his latest volume on or about Aug. 12, 1766. Parson Yorick dies in 1748. Sterne's intention, of course, was to experiment with the straight-forward chronological development of plot that had previously characterized English fiction. By dramatically scrambling chronological and psychological durations, he emphasized the dual nature of time, something to which an individual responds both by reason and by emotion. Despite the immediate confusions of the book, with its blank pages, marbled pages, squiggles, erudite references, footnotes, and puzzling time sequence (Tristram is not born until a third of the way through the work), the novel has an artistic structure of its own, a coherence that resides primarily in the character of Tristram, who holds together all of the elements of the novel, shifting his attention from character to character and from idea to idea. Influenced by the work of John Locke, Sterne concentrated less on the passage of time as the clock measures it than on mental time, in which events can move more or less quickly than clock time. Because the consciousness of the narrator is the unifying factor in the novel, Tristram Shandy can be considered a completed work.

The characters in Tristram Shandy deserve special note because of their idiosyncracies. Tristram himself seems so scatterbrained that he cannot organize his thoughts. He is quickly and easily diverted from whatever topic he is discussing to frequent digressions. While Mrs. Shandy, Obadiah, Susanna, and Dr. Slop never escape from actuality, "My Father" and Uncle Toby ride special "hobbyhorses." "My Father" believes that life should be presided over by theory, but he never troubles to see that life is so ordered. Indeed, life seems less important to him than the idea and contemplation of it. He propounds his theory of noses (the longer the better), of names (Tristram is the worst of all possible names), and of education (the Tristapedia) in the course of the novel. Although Uncle Toby is literally too sentimental to harm a fly, he is so obsessed with warfare, military campaigns, and battle strategy that he can regret that the Peace of Utrecht has ended war in Europe.

Tristram Shandy is bawdy, satiric, humorous, sentimental, filled with Sterne's extensive learning and crammed with footnotes and foreign languages. Much of the novel is made up of talk about Sterne's writing chores and his rhetorical relation to the reader. The book stands as a rich catalog of the possibilities of misunderstanding and confusion inherent in language.

A Sentimental Journey

Parson Yorick, who dies in Tristram Shandy, was habitually identified with Sterne, an identification that he himself promoted in 1760 and again in 1766 by publishing his sermons under the title The Sermons of Mr. Yorick. This identification is also apparent in the brief A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), a reworking of volume 7 of Tristram Shandy. In both works Parson Yorick is a whimsical, good-hearted, slightly daffy character. The Journey, employing typical Sternean techniques, follows Yorick on a tour through France and Italy punctuated with misadventures, sexual ploys, and the usual fill of digressions and abrupt shifts in topic and tone. Sterne's Sermons, from which he earned a considerable income, shows the development of a moral theory that is more imaginative than his orthodox religion and more complex as a philosophy.

Sterne's fiction exhibits his ability to give immediacy to a dialogue; to handle dramatic techniques with great skill; to capture idiom with delightful mimicry; to quote frequently - if not always accurately - from the Bible and William Shakespeare and other English authors; and to present his ideas with a witty indecision that charms the reader even as it goads his patience.

The small number of letters that form Sterne's correspondence exhibit his playfulness with language and provide an intensely personal view of him. Unfortunately, many of Sterne's letters were burned by John Botham or mutilated by Sterne's daughter, Lydia, before their first publication in 1775.

Further Reading

Two important biographical studies of Sterne are Wilbur L. Cross, The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne (1908; 3d rev. ed. 1929), and Lodwick Hartley, This Is Laurence (1943). Major critical studies of Tristram Shandy include John L. Traugott, Tristram Shandy's World: Sterne's Philosophical Rhetoric (1954); William B. Piper, Laurence Sterne (1966); Melvyn Nero, Laurence Sterne as Satirist (1969); and William Holtz, Image and Immortality: A Study of Tristram Shandy (1970). Lodwick Hartley, Laurence Sterne in the Twentieth Century: An Essay and a Bibliography of Sternean Studies, 1900-1965 (1966), is an indispensable review of Sterne scholarship. Valuable essays on Sterne's works are included in Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (1953); Ian P. Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957); and Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961).

Additional Sources

Cash, Arthur H. (Arthur Hill), Laurence Sterne, the early & middle years, London; New York: Routledge, 1992.

Cash, Arthur H. (Arthur Hill), Laurence Sterne, the later years, London; New York: Routledge, 1992.

Connely, Willard, Laurence Sterne as Yorick, Westport, Conn.:Greenwood Press, 1979.

Sterne, Laurence (1713-68). Novelist and humorist. Son of a low-ranking infantry officer but educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he embraced Locke's philosophy and contracted tuberculosis, Sterne was ordained and collated to a Yorkshire living (1738). Tristram Shandy (1759) prompted applause and abuse for its sentimentality and salaciousness, though, freeing the novel from straightforward narrative, it has since been n as begetter of ‘stream-of-consciousness’ writing.

Sterne, Laurence (Clonmel, 1713-68, London), English clergyman and novelist, whose mixture of whimsical humour and sentiment exhibited in Tristram Shandy (1760-7) and A Sentimental Journey (1768) influenced German writers from the Sturm und Drang to the Romantic movement (see Romantik). C. M. Wieland, M. A. von Thümmel, Th. G. Hippel, and Jean Paul show his influence.

Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768), novelist and clergyman; born in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, where his father was stationed. Sterne's mother (née Herbert) was Irish. He was sent to school in Yorkshire at 10, and entered Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1733. In 1738 he obtained a living at Sutton-on-the-Forest. The first two volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy appeared in 1759, and succeeding volumes came out at intervals up to 1767. The immediate popularity of Tristram Shandy made Sterne a celebrity. Sterne acquired a living at Coxwold in Yorkshire in 1760, and settled there at the house he called Shandy Hall. Sterne made trips to France, 1762-4, and France and Italy, 1765-6. A Sentimental Journey (1768) was based on his Continental travels. After the funeral his body was recognized in a Cambridge lecture-hall, having been sold by grave-robbers.

Sterne, Laurence (1713–1768), English novelist. Sterne is perhaps most famous as the author of Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), his serially published comic novel that propelled him from his quiet life as an Anglican clergyman in Yorkshire to the heart of London's literary society. The son of an infantry ensign, Sterne grew up living in army barracks in England and Ireland before attending school in Yorkshire at the age of ten. From there, Sterne went to Jesus College, Cambridge, and in 1738 took holy orders, obtaining a living (an endowed ecclesiastical position) at a country parish church near York with the help of his uncle, an influential church lawyer. His career in the ministry was made more lucrative when, in the 1740s, he was employed by his uncle to campaign on behalf of the Whig party in local county elections. In return for this, Sterne received ecclesiastical preferment, becoming a prebendary (recipient of a stipend given to a member of the clergy) of York Minster.

Marrying Elizabeth Lumley in 1741, Sterne added the living of Stillington to his ministerial duties and lived a relatively quiet life in Yorkshire until 1759, when he published his first imaginative prose, A Political Romance (also known as The History of a Good Warm Watch Coat). This satire on local ecclesiastical courts included uncomplimentary and thinly veiled portraits of Minster clergy and was ordered by the archbishop of York to be burned.

In the same year, and with more success, Sterne also published the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy. This serialized novel tells the life story of its eponymous hero, beginning with the exact time of his conception, and including long, often absurd or bawdy, digressions about his family, especially his flamboyant father Walter and his soldier brother Toby. Volumes 3 and 4 were published in 1761, 7 and 8 in 1765, and the last volume, 9, in 1767. In the final volume, a conversation between Tristram's mother and the parson Yorick about Walter's bull seems to sum up the entire story inadvertently: "'L-d!' said my mother, 'what is all this story about?'—'A COCK and a BULL,' said Yorick—'And one of the best of its kind I ever heard."' When Sterne visited London in 1759, shortly after the first two volumes had gone on sale, he discovered that his novel was an immediate success and had sold out at the booksellers. Declaring that he wrote "not [to] be fed, but to be Famous," Sterne nevertheless capitalized on his success with Tristram Shandy by persuading his London bookseller to publish a selection of his sermons in 1760.

With his literary reputation established and his financial position secure, in 1762 Sterne headed for France and Italy. For many years, Sterne's wife Elizabeth had suffered from mental illness (at her worst, she believed herself to be the queen of Bohemia); Sterne had suffered with consumption (tuberculosis) since his days at Cambridge, and the trip to Europe was hoped to be beneficial for both. Finally returning to London in 1767, Sterne began an affair with Elizabeth Draper, the wife of an official in the East India Company. When she was forced to move to India with her husband, Sterne began his Journal to Eliza (also called the Bramine's Journal ), which he kept for six months, and which was discovered in 1851. In 1768, Sterne published his next, and final, novel, A Sentimental Journey in France and Italy, which drew on his own experiences of touring in Europe and resurrected the impulsive parson, Yorick, from Tristram Shandy, as its protagonist. As with Tristram Shandy, which satirized the conventions of the contemporary "Life of . . ." narrative (or novel), A Sentimental Journey satirized the conventions of travel writing by claiming to be a journal of a grand tour (a tour of the Continent traditionally undertaken by young Englishmen) and "a quiet journey of the heart in pursuit of NATURE," with comic, and famously bawdy, encounters.

As the author of Tristram Shandy, Sterne is credited with being the originator of the "streamof-consciousness" novel, influencing modern authors Virginia Woolf and James Joyce in particular. Even in its day, this book was celebrated because it brought a new level of consciousness to the developing novel by satirizing the manipulation of fact for the purpose of fiction, and by casting comic doubt on the idea of capturing a life in writing. In his own life, Sterne also trod a fine line between fact and fiction, living in "Shandy Hall" and writing to friends under the name of "Yorick." A month after the publication of A Sentimental Journey, Sterne died in his lodgings in London; the Journal to Eliza was published for the first time in 1904.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Sterne, Laurence. Letters of Laurence Sterne. Edited by Perry Lewis Curtis. Oxford, 1935.

——. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Edited by Ian Campbell Ross. Oxford and New York, 1983; rev. ed., 2000.

——. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy with The Journal to Eliza and A Political Romance. Edited by Ian Jack. Oxford and New York, 1968; repr. 1984.

——. The Sermons of Laurence Sterne. Edited by Melvyn News. 2 vols. Volumes 4 (text) and 5 (notes) of the Florida Edition of Laurence Sterne. Gainesville, Fla., 1996.

——. Sterne's Memoirs: A Hitherto Unrecorded Holograph Now Brought to Light in Facsimile. Edited by Kenneth Monkman. Coxwold, U.K., 1985.

Secondary Sources

Basker, James G. Tobias Smollett: Critic and Journalist. Newark, N.J., 1988.

Loveridge, Mark. Laurence Sterne and the Argument about Design. London, 1988.

New, Melvyn. Critical Essays on Laurence Sterne. New York and London, 1998.

Ross, Ian Campbell. Laurence Sterne: A Life. Oxford and New York, 2001.

—ALISON STENTON

Quotes:

"There are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman's pulse."

"So long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him -- pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?"

"Only the brave know how to forgive; it is the most refined and generous pitch of virtue human nature can arrive at."

"Nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas."

"The history of a soldier's wound beguiles the pain of it."

"People who overly take care of their health are like misers. They hoard up a treasure which they never enjoy."

See more famous quotes by Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne
Portrait of Laurence Sterne by Joshua Reynolds, 1760
Born	Laurence Sterne November 24, 1713 (1713-11-24) Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland
Died	March 18, 1768 (1768-03-19) London
Occupation	novelist, clergyman
Nationality	English, Irish
Notable work(s)	The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
Influences Cervantes, Rabelais, Lucian
Influenced Calvino, Diderot, Joyce, Pynchon, Woolf, modern novel

Laurence Sterne (November 24, 1713 – March 18, 1768) was an Irish-born English novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics. Sterne died in London after years of fighting consumption.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Foreign travel 3 Works 4 Bibliography 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

Biography

Laurence Sterne was born November 24, 1713 in Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland. His father, Roger Sterne, was an Ensign in a British regiment recently returned from Dunkirk. Roger's regiment was disbanded on the day of Sterne’s birth, and within six months the family had returned to Yorkshire in northern England.

The first decade of Sterne’s life was spent moving from place to place as his father was reassigned throughout Ireland. During this period Sterne never lived in one place for more than a year. In 1724, his father took Sterne to Roger's wealthy brother, Richard, so that Sterne could attend Hipperholme Grammar School near Halifax; Sterne never saw his father again as Roger was ordered to Jamaica where he died of a fever in 1731. Sterne was admitted to a sizarship at Jesus College, Cambridge, in July 1733 at the age of 20.^[1] His great-grandfather Richard Sterne had been the Master of the college as well as the Arhbishop of York. Sterne graduated with a degree of Bachelor of Arts in January 1737; and returned in the summer of 1740 to be awarded his Master of Arts degree.^[1]

Sterne seems to have been destined to become a clergyman, and was ordained as a deacon in March of 1737 and as a priest in August, 1738. Shortly thereafter Sterne was awarded the vicarship living of Sutton-on-the-Forest in Yorkshire (1713-1768). Sterne married Elizabeth Lumley in 1741. Both were ill with consumption. In 1743, he was presented to the neighbouring living of Stillington by Rev. Richard Levett, Prebendary of Stillington, who was patron of the living.^[2] Subsequently Sterne did duty both there and at Sutton. He was also a prebendary of York Minster. Sterne’s life at this time was closely tied with his uncle, Dr. Jaques Sterne, the Archdeacon of Cleveland and Precentor of York Minster. Sterne’s uncle was an ardent Whig, and urged Sterne to begin a career of political journalism which resulted in some scandal for Sterne and, eventually, a terminal falling-out between the two men.

Jaques Sterne was a powerful clergyman but a mean-tempered man and a rabid politician. In 1741–42 Sterne wrote political articles supporting the administration of Sir Robert Walpole for a newspaper founded by his uncle but soon withdrew from politics in disgust. His uncle became his archenemy, thwarting his advancement whenever possible.

Sterne lived in Sutton for twenty years, during which time he kept up an intimacy which had begun at Cambridge with John Hall-Stevenson, a witty and accomplished bon vivant, owner of Skelton Hall in the Cleveland district of Yorkshire. Without Stevenson, Sterne might have been a more decorous parish priest, but then might never have written Tristram Shandy.

It was while living in the country-side, having failed in his attempts to supplement his income as a farmer and struggling with tuberculosis, that Sterne began work on his most famous novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the first volumes of which were published in 1759. Sterne was at work on his celebrated comic novel during the year that his mother died, his wife was seriously ill, and he was ill himself with consumption. The publication of Tristram Shandy made Sterne famous in London and on the continent. He was delighted by the attention, and spent part of each year in London, being fêted as new volumes appeared. Indeed, Baron Fauconberg rewarded Sterne by appointing him as the perpetual curate of Coxwold, North Yorkshire.

In 1759, to support his dean in a church squabble, Sterne wrote A Political Romance (later called The History of a Good Warm Watch-Coat), a Swiftian satire of dignitaries of the spiritual courts. At the demands of embarrassed churchmen, the book was burned. Thus, Sterne lost his chances for clerical advancement but discovered his real talents. Turning over his parishes to a curate, he began Tristram Shandy. An initial, sharply satiric version was rejected by Robert Dodsley, the London printer, just when Sterne's personal life was upset. His mother and uncle both died. His wife had a nervous breakdown and threatened suicide. Sterne continued his comic novel, but every sentence, he said, was “written under the greatest heaviness of heart.” In this mood, he softened the satire and told about Tristram's opinions, his eccentric family, and ill-fated childhood with a sympathetic humour, sometimes hilarious, sometimes sweetly melancholic—a comedy skirting tragedy.

Foreign travel

Further information: Great Britain in the Seven Years War and France in the Seven Years War

Sterne continued to struggle with his illness, and departed England for France in 1762 in an effort to find a climate that would alleviate his suffering. Sterne was lucky to attach himself to a diplomatic party bound for Turin, as England and France were still adversaries in the Seven Years' War. Sterne was gratified by his reception in France where reports of the genius of Tristram Shandy had made him a celebrity. Aspects of this trip to France were incorporated into Sterne’s second novel, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, which was published at the beginning of 1768. The novel was written during a period in which Sterne was increasingly ill and weak.

Less than a month after Sentimental Journey was published, early in 1768, Sterne's strength failed him, and he died in his lodgings at 41 Old Bond Street on the 18 March, at the age of 54. He was buried in the churchyard of St George's, Hanover Square.

In a curiously "Shandean" twist in events, it appears that Sterne's body was stolen shortly after it was interred and sold to the anatomists. It was recognised by somebody who knew him and discreetly reinterred. When the churchyard of St. George's was redeveloped in the 1960s, his skull was disinterred (in a manner befitting somebody who chose for himself the nickname of "Yorick"), partly identified by the fact that it was the only skull of the five in Sterne's grave that bore evidence of having been anatomised, and transferred to Coxwold Churchyard in 1969.^[3] The story of the reinterment of Sterne's skull in Coxwold is alluded to in Malcolm Bradbury's novel To The Hermitage.

Works

Sterne's early writing life was unremarkable. He wrote letters, had two ordinary sermons published (in 1747 and 1750), and tried his hand at satire. He was involved in, and wrote about, local politics in 1742. His major publication prior to Tristram Shandy was the satire A Political Romance (1759), aimed at conflicts of interest within York Minster. A posthumously published piece on the art of preaching, A Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais, appears to have been written in 1759. Sterne did not begin work on Tristram Shandy until he was 46 years old.

Sterne is best known for his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, for which he became famous not only in England, but throughout Europe. Translations of the work began to appear in all the major European languages almost upon its publication, and Sterne influenced European writers as diverse as Diderot and the German Romanticists. His work had also noticeable influence over Brazilian author Machado de Assis, who made exceptional (and outstandingly original) usage of the digressive technique in the masterful novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. Indeed, the novel, in which Sterne manipulates narrative time and voice, parodies accepted narrative form, and includes a healthy dose of "bawdy" humor, was largely dismissed in England as being too corrupt. Samuel Johnson's verdict in 1776 was that "Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last." This is strikingly different from the views of European critics of the day, who praised Sterne and Tristram Shandy as innovative and superior. Voltaire called it "clearly superior to Rabelais", and later Goethe praised Sterne as "the most beautiful spirit that ever lived." Both during his life and for a long time after, efforts were made by many to reclaim Sterne as an arch-sentimentalist; parts of Tristram Shandy, such as the tale of Le Fever, were excerpted and published separately to wide acclaim from the moralists of the day. The success of the novel and its serialized nature also allowed many imitators to publish pamphlets concerning the Shandean characters and other Shandean-related material even while the novel was yet unfinished.

The novel itself is difficult to describe. The story starts with the narration, by Tristram, of his own conception. It proceeds by fits and starts, but mostly by what Sterne calls "progressive digressions" so that we do not reach Tristram's birth before the third volume. The novel is rich in characters and humor, and the influences of Rabelais and Cervantes are present throughout. The novel ends after 9 volumes, published over a decade, but without anything that might be considered a traditional conclusion. Sterne inserts sermons, essays and legal documents into the pages of his novel; and he explores the limits of typography and print design by including marbled pages and, most famously, an entirely black page within the narrative. Many of the innovations that Sterne introduced, adaptations in form that should be understood as an exploration of what constitutes the novel, were highly influential to Modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and more contemporary writers such as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. Italo Calvino referred to Tristram Shandy as the "undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century." The Russian Formalist writer Viktor Shklovsky regarded Tristram Shandy as the archetypal, quintessential novel, of which all other novels are mere subsets: "Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel of world literature."^[4]

However, the leading critical opinions of Tristram Shandy tend to be markedly polarised in their evaluations of its significance. Since the 1950s, following the lead of D.W. Jefferson, there are those who argue that, whatever its legacy of influence may be, Tristram Shandy in its original context actually represents a resurgence of a much older, Renaissance tradition of "Learned Wit" - owing a debt to such influences as the Scriblerian approach.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy is a less influential book, although it was better received by English critics of the day. The book has many stylistic parallels with Tristram Shandy, and indeed, the narrator is one of the minor characters from the earlier novel. Although the story is more straightforward, A Sentimental Journey can be understood to be part of the same artistic project to which Tristram Shandy belongs.

Two volumes of Sterne's Sermons were published during his lifetime; more copies of his Sermons were sold in his lifetime than copies of Tristram Shandy, and for a while he was better known in some circles as a preacher than as a novelist. The sermons though are conventional in both style and substance. Several volumes of letters were published after his death, as was Journal to Eliza, a more sentimental than humorous love letter to a woman Sterne was courting during the final years of his life. Compared to many eighteenth century authors Sterne's body of work is quite small.

Bibliography

His works, first collected in 1779. were edited, with newly discovered letters, by J. P. Browne (London, 1873). A less complete edition was edited by G. Saintsbury (London, 1894). The Florida Edition of Sterne's works is currently the leading scholarly edition - although the final volume (Sterne's letters) has yet to be published.

• René Bosch, Labyrinth of Digressions: Tristram Shandy as Perceived and Influenced by Sterne's Early Imitators (Amsterdam, 2007)
• W. M. Thackeray, in English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1853; new edition, New York, 1911)
• Percy Fitzgerald, Life of Laurence Sterne (London, 1864; second edition, London, 1896)
• Paul Stapfer, Laurence Sterne, sa personne et ses ouvrages (second edition, Paris, 1882)
• H. D. Traill, Laurence Sterne, "English Men of Letters," (London, 1882)
• Texte, Rousseau et le cosmopolitisme littôraire au XVIIIème siècle (Paris, 1895)
• H. W. Thayer, Laurence Sterne in Germany (New York, 1905)
• P. E. More, Shelburne Essays (third series, New York, 1905)
• W. L. Cross, Life and Times of Sterne, (New York, 1909)
• W. S. Sichel, Sterne; A Study (New York, 1910)
• L. S. Benjamin, Life and Letters (two volumes, 1912)
• Arthur Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years (ISBN 0-416-82210-X, 1975) and Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (ISBN 0-416-32930-6, 1986)
• Rousseau, George S. (2004). Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-3454-1
• D. W. Jefferson, "Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit" in Essays in Criticism, 1(1951), 225-48
• Laurence Sterne: Study resource materials on mantex.co.uk
• Tristram Shandy: An Annotated Bibliography by Jack Lynch
• The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21). Vol. 10. The Age of Johnson. III. Sterne, and the Novel of His Times. Bibliography.
• Bibliography for the study of Laurence Sterne
• Useful Articles on Laurence Sterne, available online

See also

• Hypertext fiction

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Laurence Sterne in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.
2. ^ The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne, Wilbur Lucius Cross, Russell & Russell, 1967
3. ^ "Is this the skull of Sterne?", The Times, 1969-06-05 
4. ^ [1]

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Laurence Sterne

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Laurence Sterne

• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy & A Sentimental Journey. Munich: Edited by Günter Jürgensmeier, 2005
• From Sterne to Baldessari: The Illustration of Tristram Shandy, 1760–1996
• Laurence Sterne in Cyberspace
  • includes links to various e-texts of both Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey
• Works by Laurence Sterne at Project Gutenberg
• Ron Schuler's Parlour Tricks: The Scrapbook Mind of Laurence Sterne
• Laurence Sterne at the Open Directory Project
• Karslyan, Karen: Sterne's Art of Playing On Clock Hands" (in Russian)
• Asterisk*: a site inspired by Sterne dedicated to the study of innovative narrative
• tristramshandyweb.it: The Tristram Shandy Web - Annotated edition of "Tristram Shandy", in hypertext format. With bibliography. Criticism.
• Laurence Sterne Resource
• Laurence Sterne at the Google Books Search
• Sterne at The Internet Archive Text Search
• The Shandean: A Journal Devoted to the Works of Laurence Sterne (tables of contents available online)

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