Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel

by Thomas Keymer

Overview

"Tristram is the Fashion," Sterne gleefully wrote of his masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, in 1760. This study reads Sterne's writing alongside other trends and texts of the time, showing how Sterne created and sustained his own vogue through self-conscious play on his rivals' work. The result is a highly original account of a major early novelist, and of the way his writing reveals and defines what one witness called "this Shandy-Age."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199245925
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/06/2003
Pages:	236
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Thomas Keymer is Elmore Fellow and Tutor in English at St Anne's College, Oxford and Lecturer in English Language and Literature, University of Oxford. He is the author of Richardson's Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (CUP 1992); editor of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings (Everyman 1994), Henry Fielding's The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (Penguin 1996); and co-editor of the six volumes of The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, 1740-1750 (Pickering and Chatto 2001), Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (World's Classics 2001), Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Shamela (World's Classics 1999), and volume 1 of Prefaces, Postscripts, and Related Writings of Samuel Richardson (Pickering and Chatto 1998).

Table of Contents

List of illustrationsList of abbreviationsIntroductionI. Narrative Discourse and Print Culture from Pamela to Tristram Shandy1. Sterne and the 'new species of writing'2. Novels, print, and meaningII. The Serialization of Tristram Shandy3. The practice and poetics of serial fiction4. Serializing a selfIII. Sterne in the literary culture of the 1760s5. Tristram Shandy and the freshest moderns6. The literature of Whiggism and the politics of war

Editorial Reviews

"Keymer [has] a gift for beautiful and sharply observant prose, and more than that, a quickness of intelligence that illuminates everything he touches on.... Keymer deepens our understanding both of the ways in which Sterne's experiments with novelistic resources are grounded in mid-eighteenth-century conventions and tropes and of how Sterne appeals far beyond the eighteenth century to our own absorption in the problems of representation and indeterminacy. In its breadth, elegance, and economy this is exemplary work."—Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

"In this learned and polemical study, Keymer puts Tristram Shandy back into its own age.... Keymer is the right man for the job: few scholars have read as widely, especially in the obscure novels of the 1750s.... This is a provocative, well researched, and very readable book. Highly recommended."—Choice

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