Laurence Sterne
Sterne, Laurence - stûrn, 1713–68, English author, b. Ireland. Educated at Cambridge, he entered the Anglican church and was given the living of Sutton-in-the-Forest, Yorkshire, in 1738, where he remained until 1759. He came to London the following year and was a great social success. Unhappily married, he was involved with various women during his lifetime, most notably Mrs. Eliza Read More...
Sterne, Laurence - stûrn, 1713–68, English author, b. Ireland. Educated at Cambridge, he entered the Anglican church and was given the living of Sutton-in-the-Forest, Yorkshire, in 1738, where he remained until 1759. He came to London the following year and was a great social success. Unhappily married, he was involved with various women during his lifetime, most notably Mrs. Eliza Draper, for whom he wrote the Journal to Eliza (1767). He led a somewhat dissolute life and much of the time was plagued by ill health, dying finally of tuberculosis. In 1760 the first volume of his masterpiece Tristram Shandy appeared. Although it was denounced on moral and literary grounds by Dr. Johnson, Horace Walpole, and others, the book was a popular success and eight subsequent volumes followed (1761–67). As a result of his travels to the Continent (1762–66) he wrote, but left unfinished, A Sentimental Journey (1768). He also published in his lifetime several volumes of sermons. One of the most entertaining and original literary works in English, Tristram Shandy is, in a sense, a parody of a novel. It is a hodgepodge of character sketches, blank pages, dramatic action, transposed chapters, and various digressions. Sterne constantly obtrudes himself into the novel and is by turns witty, satiric, sentimental, knowledgeable, and obscene. Beneath this apparent chaos, however, is a structure based on the association of ideas. In Tristram Shandy Sterne enlarged the scope of the novel from the mere recording of external incidents to the depiction of a complex of internal impressions, thoughts, and feelings. See the Shakespeare Head Press edition of his works (7 vol., 1926–27); his letters (ed. by L. P. Curtis, 1935); his memoirs ed. by D. Grant (1950); biographies by W. L. Cross (3d rev. ed. 1967), W. B. Piper (1965), D. Thomson (1973), and A. H. Cash (2 vol.,1975–86); studies by L. C. Hartley (1966), J. M. Stedmond (1967), J. Traugott, comp. (1968), and Valerie G. Myer (1984). The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright© 2004, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved. |
Laurence Sterne
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The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.
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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: Comprising the Humorous Adventures of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim
by Laurence Sterne, Darley. 525 pgs.
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Literature and Legal Discourse: Equity and Ethics from Sterne to Conrad
by Dieter Paul Polloczek. 269 pgs.
The intersection between law and literature is a developing area in literary studies. Recent work argues that literature provides an imaginary forum in which legal ideals and practices may be tested. Dieter Polloczek's study develops this idea to show how the novel, with its increasing social scope and formal sophistication provided a means of transmitting, questioning and refining society's traditions, values and modes of self-questioning. Polloczek's study is both theoretical and historical, extending from the eighteenth century to the modernist period, and covering texts from Sterne, Dickens, Bentham and Conrad.
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Sermons on Sermonizing: The Pulpit Rhetoric of Swift and Sterne, in Philological Quarterly
by Christopher Fanning. multiple pgs.
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The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Chap. 5 "From Personal Identity to the Material Text: Sterne, Mackenzie, and Scott")
by Everett Zimmerman. 250 pgs.
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The Columbia History of the British Novel ("Sterne: Comedian and Experimental Novelist" begins on p. 154)
by John J. Richetti, John Bender, Deirdre David, Michael Seidel. 1066 pgs.
What do Pamela, Shamela, and Evelina have in common? Who is Coningsby? Where is The Moonstone? When does one need A Room of One's Own? Why is it that Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit? And just how good is the British novel? These are just a few of the questions answered in The Columbia History of the British Novel. John Richetti's comprehensive history takes us from the birth of the novel in the eighteenth century through its social and culture-conscious growing pains in the nineteenth century to its angst-ridden maturity in the twentieth century. Concise, cohesive, and complementary to any collection of must-read classics, The Columbia History of the British Novel challenges and enlightens us by examining canonical writers as well as women and postcolonial novelists. Discover the origins of the novel in the "scandalous" books of Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Delarivier Manley and follow its development through Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne against the backdrop of the novel's meteoric rise in the 1700s. Follow Frances Burney and the rise of the woman novelist, and the gothic novel as invented by Horace Walpole and perfected by Mary Shelley and Matthew Lewis. Remember remarkable reunions in Jane Austen; the bond between chivalry, Waverley, and Sir Walter Scott; the Brontes, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and the tradition of Romantic women's fiction; Charles Dickens and the professionalization of literature; George Eliot and the novel of ideas; and Wilkie Collins and the sensation mania of the 1860s. Continue through the nineteenth century with the "Condition of England" novels of Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell, Hardy's tales of class and sexualdifference, and Anglo-Indian perspectives on the empire from Rudyard Kipling and Philip Meadows Taylor. Enter the twentieth century and examine the modern novel with Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Then trace the anti-
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The Good-Natured Man: The Evolution of a Moral Ideal, 1660-1800 (Discussion of Laurence Sterne begins on p. 48)
by John K. Sheriff. 129 pgs.
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Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism ("Job's Wife and Sterne's Other Women" on pg. 55)
by Laura Claridge, Elizabeth Langland. 344 pgs.
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In Proximity: Emmanuel Levinas and the Eighteenth Century ("Reading Sterne through Proust and Levinas" begins on p. 111)
by Robert Bernasconi, Richard A. Cohen. 420 pgs.
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