... do not exemplify narrative desire, as Peter Brooks argued in Reading for the Plot as much as frustrate it. A close reading of Tristram Shandy shows that Laurence Sterne intended his novel to resist what he saw as a series of related mid-eighteenth-century cultural developments: a paradigm shift...

...Kyoko Takanashi Taking Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey as a case study, this article explores how mid-eighteenth-century novels of sensibility theorized mediation—and by extension, the very act of reading. Sentimental fiction draws attention to the instability of individual feeling...

... epistemology to ethics. Examining narrative fictions by Laurence Sterne, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin, and Mary Hays, Norton shows how even the most conspicuous explorations of selfhood and perception pose fundamentally ethical questions. How do we bear external evils? How, like...

... and Male Homosocial Desire . New York: Columbia UP, 1985 . Spacks , Patricia Meyers . Desire and Truth: The Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990 . Sterne , Laurence . A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy . 1768. Ed. Graham...

... undertow to the commercial and political currents drawing European nations together during the period (9). Rather than offering readings of Richardson, Rousseau, or Goethe (whom she mentions as popular successes) or, for that matter, Defoe or Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Festa reads Laurence...

... failure respond (62). From this point Systems Failure turns, in chapters 2 through 5, to a series of readings of prose fiction from Laurence Sterne to Jane Austen. Taken together, these readings make a significant contribution to the study of novelistic realism. In this way Franta's book...

..., with examples from Laurence Sterne, Olaudah Equiano, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen, that human emotion belongs to disjointedness and a lack of ease. Gross's efforts require more shadowboxing, digression, and stark juxtaposition than one might expect—unless or until one recognizes Sterne's Sentimental...

... speech, or intricately crafted narration in Laurence Sterne's case, the pulses that animate various bodies can be brought into coordination or isochrony. Beats, then, are shown to be inherently social, though not conclusively so. Yahav notes that “[r]hythmic sympathetic moments in Tristram Shandy...

... of reading, which turns out to have broad implications: social relationships are determined by reading books and also by reading persons. In ac- counts of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, Sarah Field- ing's David Simple, and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Spacks...

... turns to par- ticular plots, presenting readings of novels by Daniel Defoe, Fielding, and Laurence Sterne. Taken together, these readings illustrate Molesworth’s contention that to gamble is to enter plot and that novelistic plots invite readers to engage in risk analysis. The chapter on Defoe...

... our views on those forms? Was there no affirmative laughter or Shandeism—rehabilitating laughter, that is, or laughter that defied misery—and if there really was not, how did Laurence Sterne manage to convince himself that there was? Even if we agree to discuss malign laughter exclusively, then what...

... such contexts in vivid detail, enabling not just Confessions but a host of other works to fly their true colors as fictional experi- ments that are as much a part of their time as were Laurence Sterne’s or Miguel de Cervantes’s. Rather than being buried by footnotes and textual notes, the novels...

.... He includes Daniel Defoe (as a sort of precursor) and the nineteenth century’s familiar big three of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett, along with Laurence Sterne and Oliver Gold- smith. But Taine also includes Samuel Johnson—emphasizing the moral essays over Rasselas...

... not interest the cosmopolitan reader. Harold Bloom’s Genius pushes the point to the extreme. The book has a very admiring chapter on Machado, stating that his stature has everything to do with Laurence Sterne and nothing to do with his country. As it happens, in those very same years a part...

... in a long history that goes back to the novels of Laurence Sterne and from there to Herman Melville, Lewis Carroll, and the quirkier works of modernism by Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett. These novelists all exceed the limitations of the generic form, and each does so in a sui...

... of Enlightenment literature, the hot chestnut at Phutatorius's table, Laurence Sterne offers a useful generalization on how people tend to respond to such unlikely occurrences: “When great or unexpected events fall out upon the stage of this sublunary world—the mind of man, which is an inquisitive kind...

... to tell about their travels, travails, and buffetings within the material world, their assembling and disassembling. 5 Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy , for instance, investigates the very notion of something being inside a book when Sterne has Corporal Trim equivocate humorously between...

.... Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983 . Dickens , Charles . David Copperfield . New York: Signet, 1962 . Sterne , Laurence . Tristram Shandy . New York: Modern Library, 2004 . Desiring-Production and the Novel Lorri Nandrea What does it mean to speak about...

... . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987 . “Novel,” “Novelists.” The Oxford English Dictionary . 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992 . Sherman , Stuart . Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996 . Sterne , Laurence . The Life...

...., 1752 . Spacks , Patricia Meyer . Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century Fiction . New Haven: Yale UP, 2006 . Stallybrass , Peter , and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression . London: Methuen, 1986 . Sterne , Laurence . The Life and Opinions...