Lives and Letters

Abstract

essay by Elizabeth Kraft, for example, moves backward from the Jewish mystic Gershom Scholem to Tristram Shandy, reflecting on Scholem’s curious fondness for the novel and tracing the numerous references to Jewish culture within Sterne’s writing. Another essay by Joseph G. Kronick begins with a familiar contrast between The Dunciad and The Waste Land, but finds within the latter a resolution to the battle of the books opened up by Swift and Pope. Perhaps most satisfying, though, is E. Derek Taylor’s essay on Sterne’s affinities with Thomas Gainsborough, both of whom raise similar questions and doubts concerning the rustic ideal—Sterne in the infamous (non)ending of A Sentimental Journey and Gainsborough in his deceptively complicated series of Cottage Door paintings. Here and elsewhere, the point is not so much that Sterne “influenced” Gainsborough, or that Pope should be seen as a Modernist avant la lettre, or that Sterne represents a necessary context for understanding kabbalistic writings. Rather, such essays exemplify New’s conviction, as explained in the introductory essay, that “any truly enduring work of literature may usefully be read alongside any other” (xiii). They therefore honor the legacy of a teacher and critic whose career should be seen as a beginning rather than an ending.