A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (Aziloth Books)

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Aziloth Books, 2010 - 116 Seiten
Laurence Sterne was born into poverty in 18th century Ireland, but managed to study at Cambridge University by working a servitor to other, richer students. His novel/memoir 'A Sentimental Journey' has been variously described as either a classic satire comparable with the works of Cervantes and Rabelais, or a book of utter immorality. Although it purports to be a travelogue, 'A Sentimental Journey' is more concerned with provocative and racy humour, based upon a painstaking examination of the author's own inner dialogue and emotions. Sterne was man out of time - despite a lapse of over two hundred years, his work is remarkably in tune with the worries and preoccupations of present-day readers.

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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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