Textual and Critical Intersections

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.