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This chapter begins the process of looking in detail at Marías's translations themselves, as will also be the case in Chapters 5 and 8. Chapter 3 analyses his version of Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767). Beginning with a brief discussion of Sterne's chequered reception history in Spain, the chapter then focuses more specifically on the linguistic and cultural challenges offered by Sterne's novel. The translation analysis pays particular attention to Marías's decisions surrounding naturalization of (historically and linguistically) foreign elements, rendering humour, and the preservation of the idiosyncratic rhythms of Sterne's prose.

This chapter considers Laurence Sterne's relations with Eliza Draper in India. It examines Sterne's Continuation of the Bramine's Journal. Eliza's absence is experienced as a death. The alterity of India undergoes a continuous and sometimes paradoxical translation within a prismatic imaginary that makes its difference recognisable to British eyes. The exchange between Laurence Sterne and Eliza Draper, ‘Bramin’ and ‘Bramine’, occurs within the ‘period of delirium’. It finally places the scandalousness of the exchange between Sterne and Draper, ‘Bramin’ and ‘Bramine’: at a point of insurrection within the oeconomy of imperial sensibility. The exchange between Sterne and Eliza is a negotiation and overcoming of mortal limits, most immediately those of the self. Life in India afforded her the imaginative opportunity to extend her sense of self, but it also clearly brought home to Draper the cost of her sociable ‘consent’ and the form of her inevitable exclusion.

This chapter examines the extent to which The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne engaged with politics. Beginning with Sterne’s fleeting involvement in Whig political journalism, the chapter shows how these early experiences as a writer coincided with dramatic changes to the organization of partisanship and the emergence of cynicism towards the political establishment as such. Tristram Shandy took shape, the chapter goes on to show, in relation both to the changing parameters of political activity and to a growing impulse to escape from politics altogether. Taking cues from a Dublin-published pamphlet that imagined Tristram entering into the fray of political activity, the chapter brings into focus the diverse political trajectories that Sterne incorporated into his fiction—and the ways they were subsequently closed down or rerouted by the ongoing composition and reception of his works and with the onset of his sentimental reputation.

This chapter probes the domestic origins of sensibility, or, as here defined, the ability to display a feeling heart. In many respects, sensibility originated in families, while also, like familiarity, moving beyond the immediate household-family. To write with feeling in familiar letters was one way to demonstrate that feeling, and to ensure the continuation of the ‘connexions’ with which so many were concerned. All kinds of epistolary manuals, as well as novels and stories, conveyed this message. It also appeared in printed letter exchanges, as, for instance, between Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne. The chapter thus identifies a shift as this language of feeling became a dominant domestic one, one that joined the language of petitions. This rhetoric also resonated in ever wider circles, including political circles aiming to end slavery or to foment the American Revolution (in, for instance, John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania).

This chapter resumes the relationship between Tristram Shandy and specific poetic intertexts which had vogues of their own during the period of serialization, and which retain an ambient presence in the resulting text. Here the focus is on the intricate relationship between the Toby ‘under-plot’ and the Civil War poetry of Andrew Marvell (specifically Marvell's great poem about gardens and war, Upon Appleton House), which was enjoying a major revival in Whig political circles to which Sterne seems to have gained entry, including those of the republican ideologue Thomas Hollis. This last example also opens up an important sense in which Tristram Shandy engages, albeit with wry obliquness, in urgent topical concerns arising from the Seven Years War. In Sterne's ingenious reworking of Marvell's distinctive topos, literary intertext and political context converge on the vexed debate surrounding (in a formulation Sterne uses in a sermon) the ‘devastation, bloodshed, and expense’ of global war.

Of the plurality of discourses and traditions that bump up against one another in Tristram Shandy, two have dominated attempts to make generic and hence interpretative sense of Sterne's richly heteroglot text. One strain of criticism reads Tristram Shandy as a belated exercise in Renaissance learned-wit; the other as a parody or deconstruction of representational conventions in the modern novel. Each identity, all too often, is presented as exclusive of the other. Yet to acknowledge the prominence of the learned-wit tradition in Sterne's writing need not be to deny the deliberacy of its engagement with newer forms. Instead, we may find a cornucopia of textual relations in which Menippean satire and metafictional self-consciousness coexist and unfold themselves in different intertextual modes, and display, as they do so, a hybridization of traditions and genres that in itself is typically novelistic. Sterne's satirical mode is characteristically determinate, involving necessary connections with specific precursors named, quoted, or otherwise verbally indicated in the text. His novelistic mode is characteristically aleatory, gesturing towards a plurality of potential intertexts through its play on terms, tropes, or conventions that all of them hold in common, but necessarily specifying no single one.

This chapter describes the fictional forms by which Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey present confrontations between characters separated by differences of ethnicity, race, and species, particularly in episodes that were frequently republished in popular anthologies. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, readers encountered a version of Sterne’s sentimental fiction that is incompatible with a critical consensus about his novels. While Sterne has been understood to base subject-formation on the appropriation of another’s sentiments through the experience of sympathy, popular anthologized forms of his works, by contrast, emphasize emotional disturbance and preclude the return to a stable, narrating self. Anthologized versions of Sterne mobilize aspects of his original works—the structure of the frame tale, an interest in giving voice to figures of radical difference (including animals and former slaves), and the experience of shared affect and narrative—and specify Romantic-era fiction’s revision of sympathy.

This chapter reviews the wandering of Laurence Sterne's potent figure of ‘poor Maria’, as a sign of the disciplinary production of ‘women's time’ and the violence of primitive accumulation. Maria appears to owe even more to the narrative of the sentimental magdalen. The magdalen was a significant figure of institutionalised concern, the object of a mid-century notion of national security. The aim of magdalen narrative is to chart the loss and redemption of a woman's virtue. Mary Collier's ‘A Woman's Labour’ can be read as dramatising a struggle with the imposition of women's time, revealing aspects of its secret history. This poem memorialises a point of struggle, in the terms not of singular suffering but of a collectivity — the daughters of Danaus — who turn the violence back on the culture from whence it came. There is a utopian dimension to Mary Wollstonecraft's critique of the brutalities of women's time.

This chapter demonstrates the moment of Quebec. The story of Tristram Bates is also discussed. It then investigates the spectacle of the military veteran in more detail, concentrating on the popular figure of Laurence Sterne's uncle Toby. In Tristram Shandy, Toby's blend of virtue and nature is feared while the novel at once points out his childlike innocence and powerlessness in an unjust world. The irony in Toby's case is that the language of his body provides both a critique and an explanation for violence. It is expected that Toby's bodily display of ‘benevolence’ expressed the contradictions of an ideology that both services and protests against this economic imperative. The sacrifice of the soldier is famously held to secure one powerful manifestation of the ‘imagined community’ of the nation. The British expansionist project encountered ‘barriers in its own nature’, although it was articulated in terms of the universalising of ‘benevolence’.

The genre of Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is a long-standing critical crux. Indeed, the work wears its complex generic mixtures on its sleeve even as it references the great borrowers from whom Sterne learned to borrow: Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, Burton. This chapter focuses on Sterne’s use of Montaigne’s Essays as a model for a generic procedure that informs Sterne’s writing in its organization (or disorganization), its self-conscious gathering of texts, its free commentary, and its interactivity with both its contexts of citation and its readers. Tristram Shandy is a watershed text in which the full range of the essay tradition is revisited, adapted, used, and abused to form a conversational, bookish, self-conscious, and digressive work that is as much essay as novel.

This chapter investigates the contested legacy of sensibility, beginning with the decades of reaction and reform following the French Revolution. Drawing on Jeremy Bentham’s ambivalent account of “rights” as “sentimental” and “figurative,” and focusing on the unprecedented debates in the public and Parliament regarding the passage of animal welfare law, the chapter argues that the legislative recognition of animals’ personhood actualizes sensibility’s model of sovereign answerability. This chapter also tracks the association between “sentimentality,” as excessive or improper passion, and the promiscuous social identifications, such as the anthropomorphic confusion of “persons” and “things,” conservatives associated with literary humanitarianism. George Canning’s critique of Laurence Sterne’s sensibility in “New Morality” concretizes a link—between pathological sensibility, the humanization of animals, and the animalization of humans—that remains in play through the twentieth century, from Charles Dana’s diagnosis of “zoöphilpsychosis” as a nervous disorder to Hannah Arendt’s rejection of the Rousseauean politics of pity.

This chapter focuses on the novelty of Laurence Sterne. Sterne's early writings consisted mainly of sermons. He won both immediate celebrity and lasting literary fame, however, with two works that he produced in the final decade of his life: Tristram Shandy, serialized in nine volumes from 1759 to 1767, and the unfinished sequel, A Sentimental Journey, published just three weeks before his death in 1768. These two books earned Sterne high praise even from tough critics. The novelty and originality of Sterne's work was widely acknowledged in an age caught up in praise for the novel and original. Tristram Shandy’s style, mode, characters, and trope became regular features of the literary landscape in Britain, Ireland, America, and even the Continent. Meanwhile, the unfinished sequel effectively created a new subgenre in fiction. Through the Modernist period, indeed, Sterne's work was recognized as a literary-historical touchstone and a provocation to innovate.

The expansion of the turnpike system and the introduction of steel springs to carriages in the mid-eighteenth century led to a sudden increase in the speed at which people, goods, and information could travel around Britain. Some celebrated the profits and pleasures afforded by this new culture of mobility. Others, including Rousseau, warned that technological improvement was not being matched by comparable advances in health, happiness, and virtue. This chapter reads the radical digressiveness of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy as a response to the alienating moral effects of the conventional modern novel’s linear, end-oriented narrative machinery. By derailing narrative progress—a rupture signalled in volume VII by the shattering of Tristram’s post-chaise—and withholding closure altogether, Sterne sought to deliver his readers from the circuit of desire, frustration, and disappointment he understood to organize both the experience of reading a modern novel and living in a modern technological society.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the transformation of the notion of sentimentality over the course of the eighteenth century. It considers Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768) to get a feel for his sentimental mood or mode, especially in relation to his interest in how a mood modulates with alterations in what Sterne's century called “humor.” The discussions then turn to the paradoxical figure of the spectator in printed prose in eighteenth- century Britain, who becomes a key player in the emergence of the sentimental mode; and the relationship between Capra's master, D. W. Griffith, and Sterne's disciple, Charles Dickens.

This chapter examines the anger caused by malicious objects in Laurence Sterne's novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It analyzes the disturbances to the bourgeois household in this novel as they relate to questions of the relationship between necessity and contingency, regularity and irregularity, wholeness and interruption, body and soul and investigates how the characters of Tristram, Walter, Uncle Toby, and other members of the Shandy household cope with these vexations, irritations, and aggravations. This chapter suggests that in this novel, language is the medium for creating an image of the good life and a means to control the accidents of everyday existence, while eloquence preserves good temper and creates pleasure in excess of the painful occasion.

It has been reflected in this book that it is the climate of the Seven Years' War, shaped by a ‘global’ imperial conflict reaching tentacularly across continents, which is constitutive of the writerly dilemmas of Laurence Sterne's narratives; a crucible for the subjective universe they continuously unravel. The serpentine line, crazily idiosyncratic and ‘Shandean’ in its predilections, draws a self whose desires and imagination run across limits, stylistic individuation scripting its wayward tag against the grain of order and convention. Sterne's wayward lines trouble the ordered economy built on an imperial recta via and its careful calibration of the nonfreedom of others. His sermon on feasting and mourning indicates a sanguinity about the wild zone of the imagination. A deeper, unconditional gravity at the heart of Shandean wit, played out in its lesson to the world, ‘to let people tell their stories their own way’.