The Shandean

A comprehensive volume of international research on the European reception of Laurence Sterne.

Exploring how readers received and responded to literary works in the long eighteenth century, M-C. Newbould focuses on the role played by Laurence Sterne’s fiction and its adaptations. Literary adaptation flourished throughout the eighteenth century, encouraging an interactive relationship between writers, readers, and artists when well-known works were transformed into new forms across a variety of media. Laurence Sterne offers a particularly dynamic subject: the immense interest provoked by The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy inspired an unrivalled number and range of adaptations from their initial publication onwards. In placing her examination of Sterneana within the context of its production, Newbould demonstrates how literary adaptation operates across generic and formal boundaries. She breaks new ground by bringing together several potentially disparate aspects of Sterneana belonging to areas of literary studies that include drama, music, travel writing, sentimental fiction and the visual. Her study is a vital resource for Sterne scholars and for readers generally interested in cultural productivity in this period.

A Bookseller's Hobby-Horse, and the Rhetoric of Translation is a study of the first Dutch translation of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) as a product of and factor in the reception of Sterne's novel in the Netherlands, and as a specific manifestation of this reception: a derived text based on interpretation of the original. It took sixteen years for this translation to appear. Why was this so? And why did its publication (1776-79) prove unrewarding to the publisher? To answer the first question, Agnes Zwaneveld relates the development of Sterne appreciation in the Netherlands — from neglect in the 1760s to a literary craze in the 1780s — to a number of socio-cultural factors, including a growing interest in German literature. This relation with German literature is reflected in the choice of books published by A.E. Munnikhuisen, a Sterne-enthusiast and conscientious publisher, but also an outsider in the book trade, whose audacity led to the commercial failure of his enterprise. A different question tackled in this study is to what extent the translation reflects the original text. Can it be accepted as a faithful rendering, or rather as an adaptation, an imitatio in the classical tradition? To understand what norms the translator, Bernardus Brunius, followed and what effects he can have been aiming at, his work is described in terms of the — rhetorical — theory of translation adhered to in his day. To avoid subjectivity in assessing the resemblance between translation and original, the comparison focuses on composition and the use of rhetorical figures as formal aspects which can be easily recognised across the centuries. The textual comparison was limited to the opening chapter of Tristram Shandy, seen as the novel's exordium, in which both author and translator are likely to have made a show of their intentions. Close reading of this chapter resulted in an interpretation of Tristram's authorial performance as inspired by both Quintilian and Longinus.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1954.

This volume of interdisciplinary essays reflect current contributions to literary anthropology. Novel Approaches to Anthropology: Contributions to Literary Anthropology showcases the myriad ways that anthropologists bring their disciplinary perspectives, theories, concepts, and pedagogical strategies to interpreting fiction and travel writing written in the past and present. The authors integrate insights from the reflexive deconstructive turn in anthropology and from critical Marxist and feminist approaches that ground interpretation in the political, economic, and social constraints and experiences of everyday life. The contributors share the view that fiction, like all artistic expression, is rooted in specific historical and cultural contexts. Literature, like all artistic expression, stimulates a critical imagination by allowing readers to take a fresh look at their own society and culture.

When Mr. and Mrs. Shandy stroll out to watch Toby and Trim march in formation to the Widow Wadman's house, they use a familiar occurrence to gauge the day of the week. The sight of Mr. Yorick's congregation emerging from the parish church tells them it is a Sunday; Mrs. Shandy provides the more specific information that it is Sacrament Sunday, which tells Mr. Shandy that it is the first Sunday of the month. Modern readers may slip over this brief exchange, but it is the gateway to a series of inquiries whose answers the original readers of Tristram Shandy would have taken for granted. Drawing on modern historical research and eighteenth-century texts, Yorick's Congregation: The Church of England in the Time of Laurence Sterne answers these inquiries.

With their appearance during the 1760s, the five instalments of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman caused something like a booksellers' hype. Small publishers and anonymous imitators seized on Sterne's success by bringing out great numbers of spurious new volumes, critical or ironic pamphlets, and works that in style and title express a congeniality with Tristram Shandy. This study explores these eighteenth-century imitations as indicators of contemporary assumptions about Sterne's intentions. Comparisons between the original, the first reactions, and a number of late eighteenth-century imitations, show that Tristram Shandy was initially read against the background of Augustan and Grub-street satire. The earliest imitators harked back to traditions of banter and folklore, bawdy and grotesque humour, pathetic stories and orthodox religiosity, reaffirming a pattern of moral and aesthetic values that was conservative for its time. Philosophical Sentimentalism appears to have been a late development. It is also argued that, partly because of their bad reputation, some of the authors of forgeries and parodies had a greater influence on the original than the reviewers to whom Sterne is often said to have listened. The imitators followed leads and themes in the first instalments, developing them according to their own conception of Sterne's project and the reasons for his success. As a consequence, they unintentially put a pressure on Sterne to alter his course, and even to abandon some of the narrative lines and themes he had set out for himself. The literature section contains a chronological checklist of English eighteenth-century Sterneana.