Book Description
Series Editors: Kinley E. Roby, Northeastern University; Herbert Sussman, Northeastern University; Joseph Bartolomeo, University of Massachusetts; George Economou, University of Oklahoma; Arthur F. Kinney, University of Massachusetts

Twayne's United States Authors, English Authors, and World Authors Series present concise critical introductions to great writers and their works.

Devoted to critical interpretation and discussion of an author's work, each study takes account of major literary trends and important scholarly contributions and provides new critical insights with an original point of view. An Authors Series volume addresses readers ranging from advanced high school students to university professors. The book suggests to the informed reader new ways of considering a writer's work. A reader new to the work under examination will, after reading the Authors Series, be compelled to turn to the originals, bringing to the reading a basic knowledge and fresh critical perspectives. Each volume features:

• A critical, interpretive study and explication of the author's works
• A brief biography of the author
• An accessible chronology outlining the life, work, and relevant historical background of the author
• Aids for further study -- complete notes and references, a selected annotated bibliography, and an index
• A readable style presented in a manageable length

Book Description
The eighteenth century was a period when the modern Novel emerged through the work of writers such as Laurence Sterne (1713-68), Richardson, Defoe, Fielding and Johnson. However, the writing of Sterne is recognized as influencing modern writing from Joyce and Woolf onwards more than any of the other eighteenth century novelists. In the last twenty years Sterne's work has become a focus for a flourishing body of work and significant debates in many new and developing areas of literary theory which include gender, sexuality, postmodernism, and deconstruction. Sterne's major novel 'Tristram Shandy' is regarded as deploying a range of 'post-modern literary devices' expected to be found in late twentieth century work rather than in work written in the 1700s.This is a critical reader, made up of a collection of essays, which combines the most interesting and stimulating recent critical thinking about Sterne. These essays represent recent theoretical and critical debates surrounding Sterne's writing and are grouped thematicallyFor readers interested in literary criticism and 18th century literature. ... Read more

Book Description
The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes. ... Read more

Book Description
Series Editor: Robert Lecker, McGill University

Written in an easy-to-read, accessible style by teachers with years of classroom experience, Masterwork Studies are guides to the literary works most frequently studied in high school. Presenting ideas that spark imaginations, these books help students to gain background knowledge on great literature useful for papers and exams. The goal of each study is to encourage creative thinking by presenting engaging information about each work and its author. This approach allows students to arrive at sound analyses of their own, based on in-depth studies of popular literature. Each volume:

• Illuminates themes and concepts of a classic text
• Uses clear, conversational language
• Is an accessible, manageable length from 140 to 170 pages
• Includes a chronology of the author's life and era
• Provides an overview of the historical context
• Offers a summary of its critical reception
• Lists primary and secondary sources and index

Book Description
Written after the success of Tristam Shandy, SentimentalJourney records Sterne's surprisingly nave impressions on two Europeanvisits in the mid-1760s. In this vivid catalogue of misunderstandings andsaucy stories, Yorick sets out for France without a passport in themiddle of a war-and attracts the attentions of the police, a literarycount, seductive shopgirls and grasping monks, finally sharing a bedroomwith a lady and her maid. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

thanks
book arrived well within the expected time frame; book was in fabulous condition.will recommend seller to friends.

boring journey
maybe this book is just dated (im being generous).it kinda reminds me of Nash's unfortunate traveller or anatomy of melancholy only less entertaining.naw, more like those essays in the tabloids from the era like the tattler - not even that good really.there are some moments of being clever but never truly brilliant or entertaining.

I realy wanted to read shandy but that dreaful film ruined my ability to get past the first page - i guess i need to wait until the bad after taste is gone. whatever - journey is truly forgettable - not worth the time whatsoever.i probably should only give it one star.

THE GREATGRANDFATHER OF JAMES JOYCE ULYSSES
a similar seemingly pointless but profoundly significant AND FUNNY epic delivered under the guise of a trivial travelogue, written by a fellow Irishman. Nice to know Joyce read his Sterne as well as his daily newspaper while traveling in Trieste.

This parody must be read and enjoyed on its own terms. Recent academic commentaries are helpful in understanding, a fact which does not detract from this work.

I wish I wish
I wish I could go around France and Italy and chat it up like this fellow does.

I also wish I could write like him.Every once in a while I run across a writer who can really tell a tale and uses English as a painter uses oils.

Ben

IN PRAISE OF DIGRESSION
The reader who expects Sterne's "Sentimental Journey" to provide something of an ordered travelogue will be disappointed. It is a seemingly artless web of loosely connnected episodes, anecdotes, impressions, musings. There is no structured narrative - one digression leads to another; some are amusing, some are absurd, some are thoughtful, but all of them are entertaining.

My current rereading of the "Journey" was itself a digression. I had been watching a movie version of "Mansfield Park" that diverged significantly from Jane Austen's novel. In one scene (which is not in the novel) Henry Crawford tries to win Fanny Price's approval by reading her a passage from the "Sentimental Journey". (It is the scene with the caged starling calling "I can't get out - I can't get out" - a very poignant and appropriate selection, in my view). So you see - I had to reread both "Mansfield Park" and the "Journey" to fully appreciate the connection; and I don't regret it.

The narrator of the "Journey" is Parson Yorick, a characterintroduced in Sterne's "Tristram Shandy", who owes as much to Shakespeare's jester as to Cervantes' Don Quixote. As he tells it, the journey came about in a haphazard manner. He had forgotten that England was at war with France and that he would need a passport. This leads to all sorts of complications and adventures, but in the end everything turns out just fine. His encounters with beggars and princes, innkeepers and shopkeepers are amusing and often revealing. The many temptations put in his way by mysterious ladies and obliging filles de chambre temporarily distract him from his purpose - but what is his purpose? The journey itself is the object of his quest.

Some of his observations are rather sobering; e.g.,he concludes that we advance in life not by the favors we bestow but by the favors we receive, and that the surest way to success is through shameless flattery. Every politician knows that - but are the rest of us ready to admit it? There is a streak of cynicism running through Sterne's lightheartedness. Even the story of the starling, which supposedly teaches the narrator the value of freedom, ends on a note of bitter irony: the bird is passed fondly from hand to hand, but no one sets it free.

As Sterne weaves into his tale characters and episodes from "Tristram Shandy",another digression is looming ahead: now we simply have to reread "Tristram Shandy"! ... Read more

Book Description
The author of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is often seen as an anachronism - a belated exponent of learned-wit satire whose kinship is with Montaigne, or a proto-modernist whose narrative pyrotechnics anticipate Joyce. Yet to many contemporaries Sterne's writing was emphatically of its immediate time, a voguish compound of all things modern that seemed to typify, if not indeed constitute, a 'Shandy-Age'.In this historicizing study, Thomas Keymer demonstrates the self-conscious imbrication of Tristram Shandy in the diverse literary culture of its extended moment. Not only absorbing but also updating Swift's Tale of a Tub, Sterne's text turns the satirical resources of Scriblerian writing on the post-Scriblerian literary marketplace, and above all on that quintessentially modern genre, the novel itself. For all its anticipation of later trends, his play on narrative representation, linguistic indeterminacy, the unruliness of reading and the materiality of text turns out to be firmly grounded in the conventions and tropes of mid-eighteenth-century fiction. Through the mechanisms of improvisatory serialization, Sterne could also engage with other new texts and trends as they continued to emerge, including 'Nonsense Club' satire, the Ossianic vogue, and debates about the Seven Years War. ... Read more