Laurence Sterne Research Articles

Literary Adaptation and Digital Humanities: Laurence Sterne and Sterneana

Abstract: Literary afterlives occupied a significant place in the cultural life of the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. Laurence Sterne's work, especially Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey , attracted diverse and extensive adaptation in various forms and media, collectively known as "Sterneana." Digital Humanities initiatives have provided unprecedented opportunities for exploring literary afterlives, bringing obscure and rare materials to light that enrich understanding of adaptation as a broad phenomenon and its role in this period. This article discusses online resources that bring Sterne-related material to new audiences, focusing on Laurence Sterne and Sterneana, a dataset hosted by Cambridge Digital Library.

Milking Sterne’s Subscription Lists, and Extrapolations Therefrom

Abstract In the eighteenth century many books were published with lengthy lists of the names, at the front, or occasionally at the back, of those who subscribed to the publication. Scholars have sometimes turned to these lists to make a point about the author or work involved, but it is fair to say that there has never been a consistent attempt to identify and make use of the subscribers of a specific author until just recently, when the publication of an identification list of Laurence Sterne’s subscribers appeared as part of the Florida Edition of Sterne’s works. This article identifies several Sterne subscribers hitherto unidentified or under-identified, discusses techniques for doing so and pitfalls in such techniques, and, finally, makes a case for the usefulness of such identifications both to literary critics and to social historians interested in Sterne’s work.

Figures of discourse in prose fiction

Abstract The essay demonstrates the relationship between specific figures of discourse dominant in particular novels and the thematic concerns or plot patterns of each individual novel. The figures discussed are (1) enthymeme, prominent in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and important also in Joyce’s Ulysses; (2) hypallage, part of the rhetoric of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, reflecting its plot pattern and its cluster of concerns; and (3) blazon, which helps to convey the implied author’s critique of the attitudes of the first-person narrator of Lolita.

Fencing with the symptom: a Lacanian reading of Laurence Sterne's sentence structure and punctuation in Tristram Shandy

ABSTRACT This essay considers Laurence Sterne's sentences from a Lacanian point of view. My argument parallels the disordered utterances that drive the narrative of Sterne's novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and the framing of psychoanalysis. Its structure as a swarming address to an enigmatic, shifting listener (the essayistic digressions, evasions, and precisions that aren't precisions) recalls the disordered speech of a patient arriving in analysis with an unmanageable, disordering symptom; in the case of Shandy and Sterne, the ‘vile cough' of tuberculosis. Throughout many free-associative sessions, the patient maps out the undislodgeable hard pan of the symptom. By tuning in to areas of anxiety in discourse, the analysand becomes a kind of ‘artist of the symptom’, reappropriating and converting it from a source of disorder to an ordering principle - a sinthome, in Lacan's punning neologism. What cannot be cured must be enjoyed: this is precisely what the author-narrator dyad of Tristram Shandy manages, converting the narrator's cough into the motor of the novel's grammar, syntax, and punctuation; and making the novel the fencing piste for its author-narrator's duel with a symptom that can't be defeated, its distinctive dash being their shared rapier.

«…Не Стерн или, по крайности, не Верн»: К описанию французского генезиса карамзинского Стерна

The article is an attempt to specify the genesis of the image of Laurence Sterne as it was created and presented by Nickolai Karamzin in the early 1790s. Karamzin’s Sterne, the most influential among other such attempts in Russian culture, turns out to be primarily French and imitative. Namely, the fragment “A Poor Man and His Dog”, presented in Karamzin’s Moscow Magazine (1792) as “Sterne’s work”, appears to be a translation not of Sterne but of an interpolation made by his French translator into the French version of Tristram Shandy. The very choice of fragments from Sterne presented in the Moscow Magazine (1791–1792) reflects not the editor’s own taste, but is a replication of the most common items from popular anthological editions of “The Beauties of Sterne”. Karamzin’s culturally influential decision not to translate and consequently not to introduce into Russian culture the original English notions of ‘sentimental’ and ‘humour’ is explained by the fact that he had viewed them through the prism of particular French texts-intermediaries. Karamzin’s insistence on reading Sterne “with tears in the eyes” and on alluding to him (in Letters of a Russian Traveller) primarily in melancholic charnel locations that made Sterne practically indistinguishable from Edward Young goes back not to the original Sterne, but to his later French imitators, such as François Vernes. Karamzin’s Sterne is contrasted with the assimilation of original narrative experiments and humour of Tristram by other Russian authors of the same period but of a different circle, Fyodor Rostopchin and Ivan Martynov.

The humorous body

This paper is a commentary upon the mingling of the affective and discursive varieties of humour in the eighteenth century based on the observation that the body and bodily processes are at the core of humour in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The author notes in this novel a curious coming together of the various conceptions of the functioning of the human body prevalent at that time and linguistic slippages. Linguistic quips aid in a slippery transition between the various conceptions of the body and discursive linguistic aspects, thus creating humour. Linguistic slips of this kind seem to be inspired by John Locke’s philosophy popular at the time, while an analysis using Henri Bergson’s essay on the comic is carried out to look at the mechanism in which humour is produced through the body in the novel as the iatromechanistic and humoral models of the body lend themselves to be seen as comic in the Bergsonian sense.

Literary Travel and Cycling during fin de siècle England

For most of the literary historians, the time period between the 1880s and 1920s have generally been accepted as the climax years of the notion of literary travelling not only in Europe but also in England. This type of journeying fashion is seen in the literary works of many English writers such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle and many others. Literary travel can be considered as roaming of places of literary interest for pleasure where the traveller could experience and re-memory of birthplaces, homes, haunts and even graves of the prominent literary figures. Visiting places related with the particular writers or books coincides with bicycle condensed years of the last quarter of the nineteenth century (fin de siècle) in England. In addition to the above writers, Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell are two different kind of travellers and their published account namely Our Sentimental Journey through France and Italy is worth scrutinizing. Both as American citizens, the Elizabeth Robins and Joseph Pennells decided to move to England in 1884, where they carried on their artistic and literary engagements for nearly thirty years, and the couple regularly had the chance to travel to Europe and brought their cultural baggage there on their tricycles. Joseph Pennell was born in Philadelphia, and he was an acclaimed lithographer of his time. After graduating from Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Joseph worked on the illustrations of travel articles and books for American publishers for a while. Through the mutual connection and overlapping of these two fin de siècle trends (literary travel and cycle travel) and the above-mentioned text of the Pennells’, this paper argues that the sentimental preconception of cycling complicates the experience of travelling for the above-mentioned couple as they tried to imitate Laurence Sterne, well-known writer of novels and travel accounts. For this respect, some supportive quotations will be given from the Pennells’ text in which they both lack to illustrate their sentimental mood in times and in other times, successfully show their joy enthusiasm in their pedalling with their tricycles. Thus, the foremost aim of this paper is to elaborate on Pennells’ text claiming their intertextual allusions on their former model Laurence Sterne.

Solitary Confinement, Aloneness, and Sociability in Sterne

Laurence Sterne develops his complex approach towards solitude throughout his fictional and non-fictional writings. Ranging between A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, Bramine's Journal, Letters from Yorick to Eliza, and Sterne's sermons, this article explores how Sterne juxtaposes the pleasures of retirement with more painful loneliness, and the opportunities that each opens up for sometimes challenging self-contemplation. Various locations stimulate Sterne's engagement with this relationship in differing ways: simply, the enjoyable solitude of country retreat contrasts with the superficial busyness of city life; but for Sterne the opportunity to attain greater self-knowledge comes through his interactions with others. Alone, he must construct imaginary forms of sociability, especially with his beloved but absent Eliza, whom he brings into a fictive conversation through his writing. In the process, the quixotism of Sterne's sentimental authorial persona leads not to a performance of feeling, but to an embrace of human frailty and hopefulness alike.

The Liverpool Library as Laurence Sterne Subscriber

The Liverpool Library as Laurence Sterne Subscriber

Laurence Sterne's Letters and Sermons: Glossing the Themes of Tristram Shandy

Here, I shall analyze not only Sterne's letters but his sermons deliberative and judicial discourse to his parishioner-friends. In doing so, Sterne created in such texts a gloss of Tristram Shandy and its thematic center: the diseases of pride and malice as well as the cures for these ills found in laughter and friendship (1:19,32;4:401). Even while my analysis will echo the claims of other scholars that these categories of texts parallel the thematic center of his Sterne's fiction, I shall stress that Sterne created what amounts to a thematic gloss from a stance outside his novel. Unlike his fictionwriting contemporaries, whose used letters to drive plot within their novels, Sterne's letter-and-sermon gloss to Tristram Shandy underscores his abiding intent to challenge traditional boundaries between autobiography and fiction.

Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Affective Profit

Affective Profit

«Жалкая дань сентиментализму» Якова Галинковского

Yakov Galinkovsky (1777–1815) is remembered in the history of literature primarily as compiler and translator of the aesthetic encyclopedia “Coryphaeus, or a Key to Literature” (1802–1807), that had been trampled down by both opposing literary “camps,” the “karamzinists” and the “shishkovites;” and also as the author of critical articles anonymously published in 1805 in the “The Northern Messenger” that were harshly resented as directed against Karamzin and his school in literature. In his later years Galinkovsky was a member of “Beseda” (“Conversations of Lovers of Russian Word”) and although this affiliation originated primarily due to his family kinship to Derzhavin, this has made him a reputation, among contemporaries as well as most later researchers, of a “mediocre pedant” and musty “archaist.” His literary evolution was outlined as a rapid regression from the “karamzinism” of his earlier novels to the “anti-karamzinism” induced by his early association with Andrey Turgenev’s “Friendly Literary Society,” and lastly to “shishkovism.” We attempt to retrieve Galinkovsky from this dominant literary framework of the epoch that however was not central for him personally, and to position him in a different context and circle that was really relevant for him — that of learned translators and critics, “archaic enlighteners.” The present article offers a new reading of Galinkovsky’s earlier novels inaccurately labelled “karamzinist” and unfairly dismissed as a “miserable tribute to sentimentalism.” When read more closely and sympathetically and, more importantly, shifting the research outlook away from the focus on Karamzin, they appear to be primarily meta-literary critique and study of the genre possibilities, especially of the hybrid of epistolary novel of the “English” type with the modern and “realistic” Russian material. We also review the way Galinkovsky as a novelist-cum-translator read Laurence Sterne, one of the major literary models of literary sentimentalism. Galinkovsky noted the specificity and thus untranslatability into Russian of Sternean notions of “sentimentality” and “humour,” that had been totally absent from the dominant Russian image of “tender” and “sensitive” Sterne as created by Karamzin.

Williams, Helen. Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book

Williams, Helen. <i>Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book</i>

Bobker, Danielle. The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy

Bobker, Danielle. <i>The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy</i>

BRITTING, THE MAGICIAN - OF TRICKSTERS AND DOPES, AND DECEPTIVE STORYLINES

The Frisian writer Tsjibbe Gearts van der Meulen (1824-1906) wrote a short story entitled "Britting, the magician. A memoir", which is argued to constitute a literary masterpiece. In this story, Van der Meulen presents a seemingly innocent memoir about a stranger, Britting, and his wife, who spend some time in Burgum, Van der Meulen’s home town. A second storyline features a very humorous description of catechism conducted by the pastor of the local church. Upon closer inspection, the two storylines reveal a complex interaction, full of biblical allusions, which are used to convey Van der Meulen’s deeply cynical world view. In this world view, humanity consists of tricksters and dopes, featuring the church’s pastor and Britting the magician as supreme examples of tricksters. The literary analysis presented here is meant to unravel the winding paths of Van der Meulen’s incidental genius as a story-teller, revealing the wealth and complexity of the interacting allusions between the two storylines. Van der Meulen’s style is very similar to that of Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy. The article has an appendix containing an English translation of Van der Meulen's masterpiece.&lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt; Article visualizations:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0227/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

Two Satyrs Against Travelling: The Arts and the Grand Tour in Peregrine Pickle, Vol. 2, and Tristram Shandy, Vol. 7

Comparisons between Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne have typically been based on Travels through France and Italy and A Sentimental Journey. Here, the travel sections of Peregrine Pickle and Tristram Shandy inform a comparative discussion of both authors’ differing pursuit of continental travel as aesthetic experience and their satirical reworking of contemporary Grand Tour narratives.

Adaptinking Tristram, or the Wunderkammer in the Flesh

The recent trend of literary tattoos, particularly popular in the English-speaking world, represents a new way of disseminating writers’ portraits, emblematic motifs, and textual fragments, on the body and online. Laurence Sterne’s already highly visual, highly quotable work is no exception. Based on a surprising encounter, this essay takes its cue from Tristram Shandy as an aesthetic object and explores how human skin can read like a blank page on which to reinscribe Sternean ink and its endless mobility.

Black Page: Tristram Shandy after Conceptualism

Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767) speaks to times outside its moment of creation, looking forward as well as back. It raises the broader issue of ‘experimental’ or vanguardist literature’s relationship to temporality: the way it offers both a mysterious break from its present while simultaneously being embedded in specific traditions. This essay approaches Tristram Shandy transhistorically, focusing on one of the most widely remarked upon instances of Tristram Shandy ’s experimentation: the black pages mourning Yorick’s death. This essay re-reads the black page alongside a specific vanguardist trajectory: Kazmir Malevich’s Black Square, and conceptually oriented art and writing by Craig Dworkin, Holly Melgard, Abra Ancliffe, Mishkah Henner, Claudia Rankine, Glenn Ligon and others. These works encourage an identification of Tristram Shandy with conceptualism’s fluid movement between artistic and literary categories, between visually striking, ‘unreadable’ literary texts and textually oriented artworks.

Interventions: An Interview with Christopher Sorrentino

InterventionsAn Interview with Christopher Sorrentino Frederick Luis Aldama Reading Christopher Sorrentino, I can't help but think of John Barth's still poignant yet decades-old observation about the "used-upness" of literature—all while championing the vital spark of those like Borges and García Márquez. I put Sorrentino squarely in the latter's camp. His work innovates, without wearing innovation on its sleeve. He inventively shapes new storytelling designs, all while keeping us grounded in tellurian matters of mind, body, and heart. He replenishes our planetary republic of letters. From his first novel, Sound on Sound (1995), which is narratively shaped as a multitrack recording session, to his claustrophobically close-up view of a fictionalized Patty Hearst in Trance (2005), to his kaleidoscopic kinesis of consciousness in Now Beacon, Now Sea (2021), Sorrentino refuses to slip into repetition or formula. He is serious about the craft. He's also an author who, like Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, Flann O'Brien, and Katherine Dunn (a few that come readily to mind), has fun—and gives us permission to have fun. We see this most visibly in the coauthored (with Jonathan Lethem) Believeniks! 2005: The Year We Wrote a Book about the Mets (2006), where the Quixote/Sancho protagonist pair, Ivan Felt and Harris Conklin, also appear on the book's jacket cover as the novel's authors; and in The Fugitives (2015) he does with the crime thriller what Cervantes did with the chivalric romance, transforming formula (genre) into transformative art. Sorrentino's creative range is broad; he coauthored (with Brit Pop artist Derek Boshier) American Tempura (2007), a magisterial study that weaves the personal with the sociopolitical; his lively Death Wish: A Novel Approach (2010); as well as exquisitely rendered, deeply probing shorter work appearing in the New York Times, Esquire, Harper's, the Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney's, among others. His journey also includes teaching at prestigious universities, such as the New School and Columbia, and holding a visiting writer position at Fairleigh Dickinson University. His accolades are numerous, including Guggenheim and Lannan fellowships, and was a finalist [End Page 68] for the National Book Award for Fiction and long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. He is a member of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y. I had the great pleasure of talking with Christopher Sorrentino about his life and work. frederick luis aldama: In 2006, your father, Gil Sorrentino, died—a beloved professor of mine at Stanford. In 2017, your mother, Victoria Ortiz, died. You chose to write with great sensitivity and nuance about Victoria's death in Now Beacon, Now Sea, capturing beautifully and candidly the idiosyncratic ways we experience the death of loved ones. christopher sorrentino: Parents are the big ones for most of us. When my father died, I felt mainly relief. He'd been dying for eight months, and I did most of my grieving while he was fading. When he was gone, I felt an enormous weight lifted. My mother's death was different. It was sudden, and shocking. Given her genes, I figured she'd keep going for another ten years. But I think her will to live abandoned her. As I relate in Now Beacon, I think she found her situation intolerable, and I couldn't really help her. With her death, I quickly and intensely felt anger, regret, and guilt. fla: You not only explore your conflicted relationship with your mother but also her identity as a Latina of Puerto Rican descent. cs: My mother's sense of her identity was complex, and she mostly kept it to herself. I think she was ambivalent about it, proud but also convinced that it was something it was best not to advertise. She certainly didn't try to keep me from my grandparents, or the rest of our family living in the Bronx. They were a big part of my life, and I visited with them regularly. On the other hand, she conditioned me to accept myself as a white, or white passing, person. It was an extension of her own aspirations, and in fact those of her parents, who fully embraced an...