Textual and Critical Intersections

Name: Textual and Critical Intersections
Author: Melvyn New
ISBN: 9780813069838

Conversations with Laurence Sterne and Others

by Melvyn New

Published by: University Press of Florida

In this collection of wide-ranging essays representing fifty years of scholarship on Laurence Sterne, Melvyn New brings Sterne into conversation with other authors from the past three centuries.

398 Pages6.00 × 9.00

Hardcover
9780813069838
Published: November 21, 2023

$85.00

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PDF
9780813070605
Published: November 21, 2023

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Description
Authors
Praise
Table of Contents

Wide-ranging essays that examine Laurence Sterne alongside writers from the past three centuries

In this collection of essays representing fifty years of scholarship on Laurence Sterne, Melvyn New brings Sterne into conversation with other authors—both his contemporaries, such as James Boswell and Samuel Richardson, and modernists, such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

New begins by focusing on Sterne’s texts and their sources, discussing the purposes of his famous borrowings from past writings, his Anglicanism, and his reliance on John Norris of Bemerton. This section concludes with an argument for the removal from Sterne’s canon of “The Unknown World.” New then offers several readings based on placing diverse texts in proximity: Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son alongside the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and Samuel Johnson’s “London” against T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The final section offers several proximate readings of Sterne alongside his contemporaries, Jonathan Swift, Richardson, and Boswell, and modernist authors and texts—Proust, Bruno Schulz, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

As he brings these varied authors together, New suggests that literary greatness inheres in the uncertainties and mysteries—in the words of Keats—of works proven capable of attracting thoughtful attention over varying times and wide spaces. He encourages the continued teaching of these challenging texts in the future of literary studies.

Melvyn New, professor emeritus of English at the University of Florida, is the general editor of the nine-volume Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne. He is coeditor of the four-volume Sir Charles Grandison in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson.

“For five decades, Melvyn New has been one of the leading critics of eighteenth-century literature, as well as one of the most important editors in the field. Styled as ‘conversations’ overheard between texts, the essays gathered in this volume celebrate the power of literary genius. Great literature matters, New argues, and, in these essays, he shows us just how and why.”—Elizabeth Kraft, coeditor of On Second Thought: Updating the Eighteenth-Century Text
“New develops arguments about Sterne and related writers that are essential reading for anyone doing serious work in eighteenth-century British literature. The essays extend beyond eighteenth-century studies to offer incisive analyses of well-known and less-known modernist fictions and subtle explorations of relations between literature and religion, as well as trenchant assessments of turns taken by literary theory over the past thirty-five years.”—Donald R. Wehrs, editor of Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature: Ethics and the Reconstitution of Subjectivity

List of Figures

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Sterne: Textual Conversations

Chapter 1. Sterne and the Narrative of Determinateness

Chapter 2. The Odd Couple: Laurence Sterne and John Norris of Bemerton

Chapter 3. Laurence Sterne’s Sermons and The Pulpit-Fool

Chapter 4. “The Unknown World”: The Poem Laurence Sterne Did Not Write

Digressions in the Manner of Sterne

Chapter 5. Taking Care: A Slightly Levinasian Reading of Dombey and Son

Chapter 6. Johnson, T. S. Eliot, and the City

Sterne: Critical Conversations