scholarly journals Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Laurence Sterne

Haydn, Laurence Sterne, and the Origins of Musical Irony

1991 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Evan Bonds
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Laurence Sterne

The repeated comparisons during Haydn's own lifetime between his music and the prose of the English novelist Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) point to qualities that go beyond essentially local devices generally described as "humorous" or "witty." Both Haydn and Sterne were acknowledged masters at fusing serious and comic elements in a single work, and both were strongly associated with the quality of Laune, by which the artist's disposition will inevitably be perceptible in his works. Like Sterne's prose, Haydn's music frequently calls attention to its own structural rhetoric. By openly subverting formal conventions of the day, Haydn drew attention to the craft of his art, thereby making the listener all the more aware of the very artificiality of that art, just as Sterne had consistently drawn his readers' attention toward the act of reading. The resulting subversion of aesthetic illusion led, in both instances, to a sense of ironic distance between the artist, his work, and his audience. And while techniques that fostered ironic distance had already enjoyed a long tradition in literature, they represented a new, and to many critics objectionable, aesthetic of music in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The Closet

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Bobker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Mass Medium ◽  
Laurence Sterne ◽  
First Century ◽  
Storage Space ◽  
Interpersonal Dynamics ◽  
History Of

Long before it was a hidden storage space or a metaphor for queer and trans shame, the closet was one of the most charged settings in English architecture. This private room provided seclusion for reading, writing, praying, dressing, and collecting—and for talking in select company. In their closets, kings and duchesses shared secrets with favorites, midwives and apothecaries dispensed remedies, and newly wealthy men and women expanded their social networks. This book presents a literary and cultural history of these sites of extrafamilial intimacy, revealing how, as they proliferated both in buildings and in books, closets also became powerful symbols of the unstable virtual intimacy of the first mass-medium of print. Focused on the connections between status-conscious—and often awkward—interpersonal dynamics and an increasingly inclusive social and media landscape, the book examines dozens of historical and fictional encounters taking place in the various iterations of this room: courtly closets, bathing closets, prayer closets, privies, and the “moving closet” of the coach, among many others. In the process, it conjures the intimate lives of well-known figures such as Samuel Pepys and Laurence Sterne, as well as less familiar ones such as Miss Hobart, a maid of honor at the Restoration court, and Lady Anne Acheson, Swift's patroness. Turning finally to queer theory, the book discovers uncanny echoes of the eighteenth-century language of the closet in twenty-first-century coming-out narratives. The book offers a richly detailed and compelling account of an eighteenth-century setting and symbol of intimacy that continues to resonate today.

scholarly journals A Central Consciousness at Work Beneath the Surface Artlessness: Narrative Strategies in “Tristram Shandy”

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 137
Author(s):  
Junfang Xu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Laurence Sterne ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Tristram Shandy ◽  
Artistic Value ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
Century Literature

‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ (hereafter shortened to “Tristram Shandy”) is a unique novel written by British author Laurence Sterne in the eighteenth century. While Sterne’s contemporary readers may have conflicting viewpoints about the artistic value of “Tristram Shandy” because of its surface artlessness and chaos, readers today in the contexts of such twentieth-century critical theories as postmodernism, existentialism, and deconstruction, find it congenial and more intriguing. I argue that despite the apparent chaos of this novel, the author-narrator Tristram is a central consciousness that holds the whole work together. And I believe Sterne narrates his story in such a peculiar way in conformity to his own perception of the outside world. Specifically, this paper aims to explore the inventive narrative strategies employed in Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” in the three aspects of narrative structure, time-shifting technique and self-conscious narrator. Amazingly, “Tristram Shandy” presents a wholly new notion of creative writing, one that goes beyond its time, and has unbreakable connection with twentieth-century literature.

Parson Yorick’s Vis-à-vis

The Closet ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 155-189
Author(s):  
Danielle Bobker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Laurence Sterne ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Tristram Shandy ◽  
Cultural Rhetoric ◽  
International Success ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter illustrates the radical strand of eighteenth-century print-cultural rhetoric that rejected the personal room and pictured it as the twisted heart of a stagnant manuscript culture that could only inhibit the modern drive toward sharing feelings and ideas. It considers the original spin that Laurence Sterne put on “A Sentimental Journey,” a semifictional travelogue that he wrote in a flush of pleasure from the international success of his first novel Tristram Shandy. The chapter describes coaches that had sometimes been characterized as “moving closets” since the seventeenth century. It explains how previous writers of the eighteenth century tended to represent enforced mingling in carriages as a source of social anxiety. In Sterne's travelogue, he explained closet and carriage symbolism in order to celebrate a small post-chaise called the vis-à-vis as the ideal vehicle of intimacy between strangers.

Conclusion: Millennial Times, Perennial Times

2018 ◽  
pp. 220-238
Author(s):  
Randall Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Thomas Pynchon ◽  
Don Delillo ◽  
Laurence Sterne ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
Narrative Forms

The millennium and fears of its ‘bug’ confirmed how far the modern world remained in thrall to exacting temporalities. Some early C21st-century novels – e.g. by W.G. Sebald– extended the resistive strategies of modernism, alongside recent ones described in Chapter Six. Others – by Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon – suggested different strategies for evading temporal constraints, and also some of the latter’s origins in the eighteenth century ‘Age of Reason’ and Industrial Revolution. Examining this age clarifies how far the rise of the novel (in its modern mode) may be attributed to newly-exacting influences of the clock on contemporary life, and how extensively these were resisted by early practitioners of the form, particularly Laurence Sterne. Resistance to the clock’s orderings can of course be further retraced, though Shakespeare’s plays – even back to Roman times – with much C20th writing suggesting it shares in wider, perennial antinomies between human reason, or agency, and nature. Though perhaps perennial, such antinomies should be seen as historically specific in scale and nature, and particularly inflected within C20th imagination. Tracing this inflection, as this study has shown, offers a powerful means of understanding the century’s history and the ways this has shaped its imagination and narrative forms.

Eighteenth-Century Minds

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paddy Bullard
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Laurence Sterne ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Distributed Process ◽  
Natural Historian ◽  
Intellectual Movement

During the last decade of the seventeenth century John Locke established himself as a new kind of natural historian of the human mind—describing its powers, classifying its ideas, and tracing the evolution of its faculties. The century that followed saw a flowering of psychological thinking, marked by a rapid distribution of theories from the realm of philosophy across the realm of literature. This chapter finds the traces of that intellectual movement in the work of three literary authors: Laurence Sterne, Samuel Richardson, and Edmund Burke. It finds that Sterne and Burke were less original than Richardson in their speculations, belonging squarely to the Lockeian associationist tradition, but that their sense of cognition as an embodied, distributed process (as opposed to Richardson’s more abstracted idea of the mind’s functions) offers scope to align them with certain aspects of modern cognitive neurology.

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