A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

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CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 04.05.2016 - 160 Seiten
Published in 1768, just several weeks before Sterne's death, A Sentimental Journey is a slightly fictionalized rendering of Sterne's own travels. It is narrated by Parson Yorick, who previously appeared in Sterne's most famous work, Tristam Shandy. More of a novel than a travelogue, Mr. Yorick;s report of his wanderings satirizes traditional travel books of the day and concentrates, via incident and anecdote, on the people he meets along the way rather than the landscapes and monuments that he sees. Full of comic mishaps, risqué jokes and playful surprises, this sentimental account was very popular in its day and influenced several future novelists, including American Elizabeth Robin Pennell who, in the 1880's, with her husband, artist Joseph Pennell, undertook the same route via tandem bicycle resulting in the novel Our Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1888).

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Autoren-Profil (2016)

If Fielding showed that the novel (like the traditional epic or drama) could make the chaos of life coherent in art, Sterne only a few years later in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760--67) laughed away the notion of order. In Sterne's world, people are sealed off in their own minds so that only in unpredictable moments of spontaneous feeling are they aware of another human being. Reviewers attacked the obscenity of Tristram's imagined autobiography as it was published (two volumes each in 1759, early 1761, late 1761, 1765, and one in 1767), particularly when the author revealed himself as a clergyman, but the presses teemed with imitations of this great literary hit of the 1760s. Through the mind of the eccentric hero, Sterne subverted accepted ideas on conception, birth, childhood, education, and the contemplation of maturity and death, so that Tristram's concerns touched his contemporaries and are still important. Since Tristram Shandy is patently a great and lasting comic work that yet seems, as E. M. Forster said, "ruled by the Great God Muddle," much recent criticism has centered on the question of its unity or lack of it; and its manipulation of time and of mental processes has been considered particularly relevant to the problems of fiction in our day. Sterne's Sentimental Journey (1768) has been immensely admired by some critics for its superb tonal balance of irony and sentiment. His Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1760) catches the spirit of its time by dramatically preaching benevolence and sympathy as superior to doctrine. Whether as Tristram or as Yorick, Sterne is probably the most memorably personal voice in eighteenth-century fiction.

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