Telling New Lies

"New's collection of some of his well-known essays places major works of eighteenth-century and modernist fiction in unexpected and illuminating juxtaposition."--Everett Zimmerman, University of California at Santa Barbara
With the finesse that transports his pun upon the idea of telling (as both "narrating" and "significant"), the author weds a new essay on Jonathan Swift and Thomas Mann with six previously published articles to fashion this new collection, unified in an introductory essay around the theme of falsehood. 

   These essays range from excursions into eighteenth-century fiction to an encounter with Thomas Pynchon's postmodernist novel V.; from an exploration of Orwell's 1984 in the light of anti-Semitism to a study of Sterne's Tristram Shandy in the light of his suppressed antagonist, Bishop Warburton; and from a reading of A Sentimental Journey through the filter of Proust to a reading of A Tale of a Tub through the filter of The Magic Mountain. 

   While the idea of fabrication is inherent in most postmodern commentary, New's criticism in these essays lies to the right of the literary academy, manifesting itself as a "contrarian," not liberal, mode of thinking. In his introduction, he takes note of the dread of totalitarianism that defines the horizon of all post-1945 literary study, and of the reader's necessary task to distinguish lies of power from lies of art--a difficult task, he writes, since "Power will often speak with the voice of art--is, indeed, art's best mimic, and worst." If we cannot find the truth in our lies and the grace in our art, New asks, what do we pass on the next generation--"what do we tell the children?"

Melvyn New, professor of English and former chair of the English Department (1979-88) at the University of Florida, is the author of Laurence Sterne as Satirist: A Reading of "Tristram Shandy" (1969) and the general editor of The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy and its annotation, vols. 1-3, 1978-84); he is currently at work on vol. 4, The Sermons. He is also the editor of two collections of essays on Tristram Shandy, one for the Approaches to World Masterpieces series, the other for New Casebooks. He serves as the Sterne-Smollett editor of The Scriblerian and is an advisory editor to The Shandean: Annual of the Laurence Sterne Trust.