Many famous antique texts are misunderstood and many others have been completely dismissed, all because the literary style in which they were written is unfamiliar today. So argues Mary Douglas in ...this controversial study of ring composition, a technique which places the meaning of a text in the middle, framed by a beginning and ending in parallel. To read a ring composition in the modern linear fashion is to misinterpret it, Douglas contends, and today's scholars must reevaluate important antique texts from around the world.
Found in the Bible and in writings from as far afield as Egypt, China, Indonesia, Greece, and Russia, ring composition is too widespread to have come from a single source. Does it perhaps derive from the way the brain works? What is its function in social contexts? The author examines ring composition, its principles and functions, in a cross-cultural way. She focuses on ring composition in Homer'sIliad, the Bible's book of Numbers,and, for a challenging modern example, Laurence Sterne'sTristram Shandy, developing a persuasive argument for reconstruing famous books and rereading neglected ones.
O objetivo deste artigo é analisar, com a contribuição da teoria estética de György Lukács, a relação entre forças produtivas ascendentes e ultrapassadas, tendo como fundamento um diálogo com a ...produção literária de Machado de Assis e o romance Tristram Shandy, de Laurence Sterne.
With their appearance during the 1760s, the five instalments of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman caused something like a booksellers' hype. Small publishers and ...anonymous imitators seized on Sterne's success by bringing out great numbers of spurious new volumes, critical or ironic pamphlets, and works that in style and title express a congeniality with Tristram Shandy. This study explores these eighteenth-century imitations as indicators of contemporary assumptions about Sterne's intentions. Comparisons between the original, the first reactions, and a number of late eighteenth-century imitations, show that Tristram Shandy was initially read against the background of Augustan and Grub-street satire. The earliest imitators harked back to traditions of banter and folklore, bawdy and grotesque humour, pathetic stories and orthodox religiosity, reaffirming a pattern of moral and aesthetic values that was conservative for its time. Philosophical Sentimentalism appears to have been a late development. It is also argued that, partly because of their bad reputation, some of the authors of forgeries and parodies had a greater influence on the original than the reviewers to whom Sterne is often said to have listened. The imitators followed leads and themes in the first instalments, developing them according to their own conception of Sterne's project and the reasons for his success. As a consequence, they unintentially put a pressure on Sterne to alter his course, and even to abandon some of the narrative lines and themes he had set out for himself. The literature section contains a chronological checklist of English eighteenth-century Sterneana.
The Liverpool Library as a subscriber of books by Laurence Sterne is discussed. Attempting to establish the identity of the men and women who subscribed to the works of Sterne during the 1760s is at ...times difficult, but never more so than when merely a surname and gender honorific has been provided. This is the case for Mr Everard, whom the Florida Sterne regards as, 'Unidentified. Thomas Everard appears to be a Yorkshire name; he subscribed to Roe'. This acknowledged guess makes sense, using Sterne's home location and the fact that Thomas was a subscriber otherwise, but it may just be that we have been provided an even better clue to the identity of Mr Everard in the listing of another subscriber.
The aim of this paper is to study The Tale of Slawkenbergius no longer as a humorous representation of the grotesque, but as a metaliterary manifestation of Sternes poetics, thus relating the tale to ...the structure of the novel. La cita pertenece a The Analysis of Beauty (1753) de William Hogarth; no obstante, bien podría haber sido aseverada por Laurence Sterne, quien en su célebre novela The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767), tal como lo había hecho Hogarth, se enfrenta con la estética neoclásica aún vigente en el momento en que su novela sale a la luz. Se tomará como caso de estudio el episodio que el propio autor de A Sentimental Journey bautiza como "el capítulo de las narices", que se extiende desde el capítulo XXVII del tercer volumen hasta el capítulo X del cuarto volumen de Tristram Shandy. Estas circunstancias dan lugar a una serie de capítulos en los cuales el propio Tristram reflexiona acerca de la temática nasal e interrumpe su propia historia para desarrollar una genealogía familiar de las napias, las teorías científicas de su padre sobre el tema y hasta para insertar un pequeño cuento, que tiene a una nariz como protagonista.
These thirteen essays represent a very wide range of approaches to the fictions of Laurence Sterne, who has certainly evolved into the eighteenth century's most important influence on modern and ...postmodern literature. While each essay centers on his written texts or his lived contexts, they together offer homage to his endurance as an author emulated by many modern writers--Nietzsche, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Mann, Marías, Goytisolo, Fuentes, Rushdie, and Pamuk; indeed, what important writer in the past 150 years has not been influenced by 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.
Approximately 2000 people subscribed to the works of Laurence Sterne. The vast majority has been identified (either definitely or possibly) with the appearance of The Miscellaneous Writings and ...Sterne's Subscribers, an Identification List, ed. New and Gerard (2014), but new information is still being found. Here further information about two subscribers, John Readshaw and Joshua Readshaw, is presented, in large part based on the connection between Joshua Readshaw and another subscriber, J. J. Angerstein; both were early underwriters of Lloyds of London and instrumental in its founding. Furthermore, the idea that such insurance underwriters were frequently Sterne subscribers is discussed.
Walker talks about "Sterne's Subscribers, An Identification List" within the ninth volume of the Florida Sterne (2014) which aroused his curiosity about those subscribers as yet unidentified or only ...partially so, despite the wealth of information this list provided. He early discovered what might have been obvious to others: subscription in the middle of the eighteenth century was often a function of social connections--some regional or professional, some personal, or familial. Genealogical information, especially, has helped to locate connections between certain or almost certain subscribers and other, more doubtful ones. To an American, tracing genealogies amidst the British peerage and landed gentry presents problems of terminology, to say the least. Changes in rank and title that could occur during a person's lifetime, let alone at the person's death, added other obstacles.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, one of the most unorthodox works ever written, substantially differs from most of the novels of its time and later eighteenth century in its plot, ...narration, and treatment of characters. In this paper, different aspects of the novel that challenge and deconstruct the points of origin in the life and character of Tristram Shandy are examined. It is demonstrated that Tristram Shandy detaches itself from the unconditional stages in the traditional narratives that are often taken for granted, including the birth as the genesis of the characters, a solid belief in the purposefulness of a narrative for moral or educational ends, the fixity of beginnings, and the rational order of ideas in the human mind. The article is divided into four major parts, including the birth, history, life, and human subjectivity, and aims at showing several unique aspects of the novel while being mindful of the close reading of the text as well. To this end, the article concentrates particularly on the events revolving around Tristram Shandy, his father Walter, and Uncle Toby. The Lockean association of ideas, which Sterne turns into a parody of Locke’s original thesis later in the narrative, is explored in the article as well.
