This is a comprehensive volume of international research on the European reception of Laurence Sterne.The intellectual scope and cultural impact of British writers in Europe cannot be assessed without reference to their 'European' fortunes. This collection of 14 essays, prepared by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, records how Sterne's work has been received, translated and imitated in most European countries with great success. Among the topics discussed in this volume are questions arising from the serial nature of much of Sterne's writings and the various ways in which translators across Europe coped with the specific problems that the witty and ingenious Sternean text poses.Our knowledge of British and Irish authors is incomplete and inadequate without an understanding of the perspectives of other nations on them. Each volume examines the ways authors have been translated, published, distributed, read, reviewed and discussed in Europe. In doing so, it throws light not only on the specific strands of intellectual and cultural history but also on the processes involved in the dissemination of ideas and texts.

Sterne's work has been received, translated and imitated in most European countries with great success. Interest in his life and work grew into a literary cult at an early stage and led to the vogue of sentimentalism: Sterne became a legendary English writer, second only to Shakespeare. Among the topics discussed in this volume are: questions arising from the serial nature of much of Sterne's writings; the various ways in which translators all across Europe coped with the specific problems which the witty and ingenious Sternean text poses; the extent to which especially "A sentimental Journey" was regarded as a provocative political text and was therefore used as a weapon in nationalist movements; how "Tristram Shandy" became a test case for theories of humour and sentiment; how Sterne's texts and the "Letters" were used as didactic tools; how the history of the reception of Sterne mirrors the continental shift from a French cultural paradigm to a German and English one; and how the cult of Maria materialized in prints, paintings and ceramics. Trans-national patterns are emphasized, as are the impact of Sterne on European sentimentalism and modernist narrative theory.

Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne derives from the Laurence Sterne Tercentenary Conference held at Royal Holloway, University of London, on July 8-11, 2013. It was attended by some eighty scholars from fourteen countries; the conference heard more than sixty papers. The organizers invited participants to submit revised versions of their contributions for this volume, and the thirteen selected exhibit, it is hoped, the defining features both of the conference and of Sterne studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is worth remarking that the selected authors represent seven countries; that Sterne may well be the most internationally accepted of all eighteenth-century English authors is certainly a claim worthy of a sentimental traveler. This collection recognizes three faces of Sterne, beginning with several biographical essays examining, respectively, his celebrity status, family life, politics, and philosophy. The second face is that of Tristram, studied from vantage points provided by ethics, linguistics, gender studies, and comparative literature. The final group of essays examines the face of Yorick as the protagonist of A Sentimental Journey, beginning with an ethnographic study of relationships, moving through questions of identity, and concluding with the possible future of literary studies-a return to aesthetics.

This book is the culmination of more than forty years of research. These two volumes, the seventh and eighth in the heralded ""Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne"", offer the first collection of Sterne's letters in seventy-five years. Thirty new letters have been added, and all have been carefully and precisely reedited, making this the most accurate edition of his letters ever produced. The correspondence is thoroughly keyed to Sterne's published output, much of which has previously been edited by Melvyn New. New and coeditor Peter de Voogd also make major use of Arthur Cash's landmark biography of Sterne. The result is a work that securely establishes the literary as well as biographical significance of Sterne's letters. Sterne remains one of the towering figures of eighteenth-century life and literature, and a continuing influential presence in the canon of modern western fiction. Among those who have praised his writings are Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, Gabrial Garcia-Marquez, Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera, and most recently, the Turkish Nobel Prize recipient Orhan Pamuk.

This book is the culmination of more than forty years of research. These two volumes, the seventh and eighth in the heralded ""Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne"", offer the first collection of Sterne's letters in seventy-five years. Thirty new letters have been added, and all have been carefully and precisely reedited, making this the most accurate edition of his letters ever produced. The correspondence is thoroughly keyed to Sterne's published output, much of which has previously been edited by Melvyn New. New and coeditor Peter de Voogd also make major use of Arthur Cash's landmark biography of Sterne. The result is a work that securely establishes the literary as well as biographical significance of Sterne's letters. Sterne remains one of the towering figures of eighteenth-century life and literature, and a continuing influential presence in the canon of modern western fiction. Among those who have praised his writings are Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, Gabrial Garcia-Marquez, Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera, and most recently, the Turkish Nobel Prize recipient Orhan Pamuk

The humour of Tristram Shandy has often been acknowledged, but it is not easy to find scholarly articles on Laurence Sterne which suggest that their authors laughed as they wrote. Nine authors have been invited to redress this in the year of the tercentenary of Sterne's birth. This volume offers nine different facets of humour, a kaleidoscope which enables readers to recombine at will the genial, the bawdy, the sentimental, the ludicrous, the hobby-horsical, the philosophical, the irreverent, the incongruous and the facetious, sending the text spiralling out of the page.