John Mullan
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122524
- eISBN:
- 9780191671449
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122524.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
The anonymous pamphlet A Funeral Discourse, Occasioned by the Much Lamented Death of Mr Yorick, published in 1761, was but one of the many spoofs and rejoinders which attached themselves to Laurence ...
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The anonymous pamphlet A Funeral Discourse, Occasioned by the Much Lamented Death of Mr Yorick, published in 1761, was but one of the many spoofs and rejoinders which attached themselves to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy throughout the 1760s and 1770s. If we are to recover Sterne's ‘sentimentalism’, we should look at the reception and circulation of his writings, and if we do this we can follow the lead of the pamphleteer. Sterne's fiction is notoriously self-conscious about the modes of a novel's coherence — about the powers of a narrator to convince, to beguile, and to satisfy. It is attentive to its ‘sociality’. Sterne's characters are attached to the world by the metaphors and allusions on which they rely, and which protect them against death, discord, and disaster. They are not mad, first because they are attached to each other by sympathy, and second because they are innocents whose limited ways with words are displayed to a reader who has to be sophisticated to comprehend their transparent instincts.Less
The anonymous pamphlet A Funeral Discourse, Occasioned by the Much Lamented Death of Mr Yorick, published in 1761, was but one of the many spoofs and rejoinders which attached themselves to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy throughout the 1760s and 1770s. If we are to recover Sterne's ‘sentimentalism’, we should look at the reception and circulation of his writings, and if we do this we can follow the lead of the pamphleteer. Sterne's fiction is notoriously self-conscious about the modes of a novel's coherence — about the powers of a narrator to convince, to beguile, and to satisfy. It is attentive to its ‘sociality’. Sterne's characters are attached to the world by the metaphors and allusions on which they rely, and which protect them against death, discord, and disaster. They are not mad, first because they are attached to each other by sympathy, and second because they are innocents whose limited ways with words are displayed to a reader who has to be sophisticated to comprehend their transparent instincts.
Gareth Wood
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199651337
- eISBN:
- 9780191741180
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199651337.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Carol Watts
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748625642
- eISBN:
- 9780748671717
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625642.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
John Owen Havard
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- April 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198833130
- eISBN:
- 9780191881558
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198833130.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
John Mullan
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122524
- eISBN:
- 9780191671449
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122524.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
With the rise of the novel in the mid-18th century came the rise of sentimentalism. While the fondness for sentiment embarrassed later literary critics, it originally legitimized a morally suspect ...
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With the rise of the novel in the mid-18th century came the rise of sentimentalism. While the fondness for sentiment embarrassed later literary critics, it originally legitimized a morally suspect phenomenon: the novel. This book describes that legitimation, yet it looks beyond the narrowly literary to the lives and expressed philosophies of some of the major writers of the age, showing the language of feeling to be a resource of philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith, as much as novelists like Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne.Less
With the rise of the novel in the mid-18th century came the rise of sentimentalism. While the fondness for sentiment embarrassed later literary critics, it originally legitimized a morally suspect phenomenon: the novel. This book describes that legitimation, yet it looks beyond the narrowly literary to the lives and expressed philosophies of some of the major writers of the age, showing the language of feeling to be a resource of philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith, as much as novelists like Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne.
Thomas Keymer
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199245925
- eISBN:
- 9780191715341
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245925.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Thomas Keymer
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199245925
- eISBN:
- 9780191715341
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245925.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Sarah M. S. Pearsall
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199532995
- eISBN:
- 9780191714443
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199532995.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, Social History
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 ...
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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).Less
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).
Jeanne M. Britton
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- October 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198846697
- eISBN:
- 9780191881701
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198846697.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
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, ...
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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.Less
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.
Carol Watts
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748625642
- eISBN:
- 9780748671717
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625642.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Carol Watts
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748625642
- eISBN:
- 9780748671717
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625642.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
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 ...
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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’.Less
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’.
John Mullan
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122524
- eISBN:
- 9780191671449
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122524.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter focuses on three very different writers whose works all chronicle peculiarly intimate relationships between the texts they produced and the social lives for which they also became known: ...
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This chapter focuses on three very different writers whose works all chronicle peculiarly intimate relationships between the texts they produced and the social lives for which they also became known: David Hume, Samuel Richardson, and Laurence Sterne. From the perspective of sentimentalism, all were committed to the resources of a language of feeling for the purpose of representing necessary social bonds; all discovered in their writings a sociability which was dependent upon the communication of passions and sentiments. It is this discovery which was formative of that fashion of 18th-century fiction now called ‘sentimental’. For these authors, the conception of harmonious sociability was dramatized not only in the books they produced, but also in their self-conscious efforts actually to live out models of social being. A biography of any of them records the attempt to make exemplary a social life. It might seem a trivial occupation, as the novelistic vogue of sentiment can appear a facile indulgence; both, however, are historically significant, bespeaking the difficulty which a polite culture was having in imagining the nature of social relations.Less
This chapter focuses on three very different writers whose works all chronicle peculiarly intimate relationships between the texts they produced and the social lives for which they also became known: David Hume, Samuel Richardson, and Laurence Sterne. From the perspective of sentimentalism, all were committed to the resources of a language of feeling for the purpose of representing necessary social bonds; all discovered in their writings a sociability which was dependent upon the communication of passions and sentiments. It is this discovery which was formative of that fashion of 18th-century fiction now called ‘sentimental’. For these authors, the conception of harmonious sociability was dramatized not only in the books they produced, but also in their self-conscious efforts actually to live out models of social being. A biography of any of them records the attempt to make exemplary a social life. It might seem a trivial occupation, as the novelistic vogue of sentiment can appear a facile indulgence; both, however, are historically significant, bespeaking the difficulty which a polite culture was having in imagining the nature of social relations.
Gareth J. Wood
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199651337
- eISBN:
- 9780191741180
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199651337.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This is a book about translation and literary influence. It takes as its subject Spain’s most important contemporary novelist, Javier Marías (1951), who worked as a literary translator for a ...
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This is a book about translation and literary influence. It takes as its subject Spain’s most important contemporary novelist, Javier Marías (1951), who worked as a literary translator for a significant portion of his early career. Since then, he has maintained that translation had a crucial impact on the development of his writing style and his literary frame of reference. It examines his claims to the influence of three writers whose works he translated: Laurence Sterne, Sir Thomas Browne, and Vladimir Nabokov. It does so by engaging in close reading of his translations, examining how he meets the linguistic, syntactic, and cultural challenges they present. His prolonged engagement with their prose is then set alongside his own novels and short stories, the better to discern precisely how and in what ways his works have been shaped by their influence and through translation. This study begins by asking why Marías should have turned to translation in the cultural landscape of Spain in the 1970s and how the ideological standpoints that animated his decision affect the way he translates. His translation of Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is set alongside his pseudo-autobiographical novel Negra espalda del tiempo (Dark Back of Time), while his translation of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial is then analysed in tandem with that produced by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Subsequent chapters examine how Browne’s prose has shaped Marías’s thinking on oblivion, posterity, and time. The final chapters offer an analysis of the partial translation and palimpsest of Lolita he undertook in the early 1990s and of his most ambitious novel to date, Tu rostro mañana (Your Face Tomorrow), as a work in which characterization is underpinned by both literary allusion and the hydridization of works Marías has translated.Less
This is a book about translation and literary influence. It takes as its subject Spain’s most important contemporary novelist, Javier Marías (1951), who worked as a literary translator for a significant portion of his early career. Since then, he has maintained that translation had a crucial impact on the development of his writing style and his literary frame of reference. It examines his claims to the influence of three writers whose works he translated: Laurence Sterne, Sir Thomas Browne, and Vladimir Nabokov. It does so by engaging in close reading of his translations, examining how he meets the linguistic, syntactic, and cultural challenges they present. His prolonged engagement with their prose is then set alongside his own novels and short stories, the better to discern precisely how and in what ways his works have been shaped by their influence and through translation. This study begins by asking why Marías should have turned to translation in the cultural landscape of Spain in the 1970s and how the ideological standpoints that animated his decision affect the way he translates. His translation of Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is set alongside his pseudo-autobiographical novel Negra espalda del tiempo (Dark Back of Time), while his translation of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial is then analysed in tandem with that produced by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Subsequent chapters examine how Browne’s prose has shaped Marías’s thinking on oblivion, posterity, and time. The final chapters offer an analysis of the partial translation and palimpsest of Lolita he undertook in the early 1990s and of his most ambitious novel to date, Tu rostro mañana (Your Face Tomorrow), as a work in which characterization is underpinned by both literary allusion and the hydridization of works Marías has translated.
James Chandler
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- June 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780199574803
- eISBN:
- 9780191869747
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199574803.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Joseph Drury
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198792383
- eISBN:
- 9780191834394
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198792383.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Tobias Menely
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226239255
- eISBN:
- 9780226239422
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226239422.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Jörg Kreienbrock
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245284
- eISBN:
- 9780823250721
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245284.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Carol Watts
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748625642
- eISBN:
- 9780748671717
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625642.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
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 ...
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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’.Less
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’.
Christopher R. Miller
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801453694
- eISBN:
- 9780801455780
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801453694.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter examines how Henry Fielding makes surprise eminently visible in his novels. It shows that Fielding's fiction incorporates the gendered forms of surprise exemplified by both Robinson ...
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This chapter examines how Henry Fielding makes surprise eminently visible in his novels. It shows that Fielding's fiction incorporates the gendered forms of surprise exemplified by both Robinson Crusoe and Pamela: picaresque violence and eroticized shock. It argues that surprise in Fielding's fiction became almost synonymous with what Joseph Addison called the pleasures of the imagination. It also contends that surprise is an essential element in Fielding's rationale for comic ridicule; that his ethical defense of ridicule is bound up with an aesthetic justification for surprise; that he is interested not only in the narrative mechanism of surprise but also its rhetoric; and that in representing moments of astonishment, Fielding nostalgically harks back to the instantaneity of theatrical spectacle, even as he develops techniques that anticipate the narrative innovations of Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy and gothic romance. Finally, the chapter explores how the two basic forms of surprise—the physical and the cognitive—are interrelated and inflected by differences of class and gender.Less
This chapter examines how Henry Fielding makes surprise eminently visible in his novels. It shows that Fielding's fiction incorporates the gendered forms of surprise exemplified by both Robinson Crusoe and Pamela: picaresque violence and eroticized shock. It argues that surprise in Fielding's fiction became almost synonymous with what Joseph Addison called the pleasures of the imagination. It also contends that surprise is an essential element in Fielding's rationale for comic ridicule; that his ethical defense of ridicule is bound up with an aesthetic justification for surprise; that he is interested not only in the narrative mechanism of surprise but also its rhetoric; and that in representing moments of astonishment, Fielding nostalgically harks back to the instantaneity of theatrical spectacle, even as he develops techniques that anticipate the narrative innovations of Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy and gothic romance. Finally, the chapter explores how the two basic forms of surprise—the physical and the cognitive—are interrelated and inflected by differences of class and gender.
Carol Watts
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748625642
- eISBN:
- 9780748671717
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625642.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This book argues that the Seven Years' War (1756–63) produced an intense historical consciousness within British cultural life regarding the boundaries of belonging to community, family and nation. ...
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This book argues that the Seven Years' War (1756–63) produced an intense historical consciousness within British cultural life regarding the boundaries of belonging to community, family and nation. Global warfare prompts a radical re-imagining of the state and the subjectivities of those who inhabit it. Laurence Sterne's distinctive writing provides a remarkable route through the transformations of mid-eighteenth-century British culture. The risks of war generate unexpected freedoms and crises in the making of domestic imperial subjects, which will continue to reverberate in anti-slavery struggles and colonial conflict from America to India. The book concentrates on the period from the 1750s to the 1770s. It explores the work of Johnson, Goldsmith, Walpole, Burke, Scott, Wheatley, Sancho, Smollett, Rousseau, Collier, Smith and Wollstonecraft alongside Sterne's narratives. The book incorporates debates among moral philosophers and philanthropists, examines political tracts, poetry and grammar exercises, and paintings by Kauffman, Hayman and Wright of Derby, tracking the investments in, and resistances to, the cultural work of empire.Less
This book argues that the Seven Years' War (1756–63) produced an intense historical consciousness within British cultural life regarding the boundaries of belonging to community, family and nation. Global warfare prompts a radical re-imagining of the state and the subjectivities of those who inhabit it. Laurence Sterne's distinctive writing provides a remarkable route through the transformations of mid-eighteenth-century British culture. The risks of war generate unexpected freedoms and crises in the making of domestic imperial subjects, which will continue to reverberate in anti-slavery struggles and colonial conflict from America to India. The book concentrates on the period from the 1750s to the 1770s. It explores the work of Johnson, Goldsmith, Walpole, Burke, Scott, Wheatley, Sancho, Smollett, Rousseau, Collier, Smith and Wollstonecraft alongside Sterne's narratives. The book incorporates debates among moral philosophers and philanthropists, examines political tracts, poetry and grammar exercises, and paintings by Kauffman, Hayman and Wright of Derby, tracking the investments in, and resistances to, the cultural work of empire.
