Laurence Sterne Novels for Education.
An experiment of a radical and seminal kind is Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67), which, drawing on a tradition of learned wit from Erasmus and Rabelais to Burton and Swift, provides a brilliant comic critique of the progress of the English novel to date. The focus of attention is shifted from the fortunes of the hero himself to the nature of his family, environment, and heredity, and dealings within that family offer repeated images of human unrelatedness and disconnection. Tristram, the narrator, is isolated in his own privacy and doubts how much, if anything, he can know certainly even about himself. Sterne is explicit about the influence of Lockean psychology on his writing, and the book, fascinated with the fictive energies of the imagination, is filled with characters reinventing or mythologizing the conditions of their own lives. It also draws zestful stimulus from a concern with the limitations of language, both verbal and visual, and teases an intricate drama out of Tristram's imagining of, and playing to, the reader's likely responses. Sterne's Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) similarly defies conventional sexpectations of what a travel book might be. An apparently random collection of scattered experiences, it mingles affecting vignettes with episodes in a heartier, comic mode, but coherence of imagination is secured by the delicate insistence with which Sterne ponders how the impulses of sentimental feeling are psychologically interdependent.
