Augustan
Laurence Sterne
1713 – 1768
Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican cleric (1713–1768)
- Kingdom of Great Britain
- Irish
About
Laurence Sterne was an Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican cleric. He is best known for his comic novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767) and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768).
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Portrait by Laurence_Sterne_by_Sir_Joshua_Reynolds.jpg: Joshua Reynolds (died 1792) derivative work: Archibald Tuttle (talk) (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons.
Life on the Timeline
Major Works
Exam Dossier
Most-asked topics
- Tristram Shandy as anti-novel / metafiction
- digression and the 'hobby-horse' technique
- narrative time in Tristram Shandy (discourse time vs. story time)
- Sterne and Sentimentalism / the Sentimental Journey
- typographical experimentation (black page, marbled page, blank page, squiggly lines)
- influence of Locke's associationism on Sterne's narrative method
- Sterne's place in the rise of the novel / English fiction of the 18th century
- comparison with Fielding and Richardson
- Uncle Toby, Widow Wadman, and the comedy of character
- Yorick as narrator-persona in A Sentimental Journey
Previous-year themes
- Tristram Shandy's narrative technique and disruption of chronological plot
- Sterne as precursor of modernist/stream-of-consciousness fiction
- the influence of John Locke's theory of association of ideas on Sterne
- sentimentalism and the 'man of feeling' in A Sentimental Journey
- Sterne's experiments with typography and print form
- Sterne's contribution to the eighteenth-century novel alongside Fielding, Richardson and Smollett
- digression as structural principle in Tristram Shandy
Common confusions
- Confusing Tristram Shandy (the narrator/title character) with Parson Yorick (a separate character and Sterne's authorial persona)
- Assuming Tristram Shandy is narrated in strict chronological order, when it is famously digressive and achronological
- Mixing up Sterne's contemporaries Fielding and Richardson as influences, when Sterne's technique is closer to Cervantes and Rabelais and departs sharply from both
- Confusing A Political Romance (an early ecclesiastical satire) with A Sentimental Journey (his final travel novel)
- Assuming Sterne completed A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, when it was left unfinished at his death
- Attributing the 'stream of consciousness' label itself (a 20th-century term) to Sterne's own period rather than to later critical retrospection
Memory tricks
'Shandy' sounds like 'shandy' (a mixed drink) — the novel is a mixed-up, non-linear mix of digressions
Toby's hobby-horse = fortifications; remember 'Toby builds towers'
'Sentimental Journey' = Sterne's last journey, published the year he died (1768)
Black page = black mourning for Yorick's death — visual pun to remember the typographic device
Political Romance and Tristram Shandy volumes I-II share the same year 1759 — 'P before T, same year'
Yorick appears in both novels — the thread linking Tristram Shandy to A Sentimental Journey
