Laurence Sterne (1713 – 1768)
Laurence Sterne was an Anglo-Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics. Sterne died in London after years of fighting tuberculosis.
Tristram Shandy will very likely appear on your exam, and I here proivde what I think are the passages most likely to appear.
Tristram Shandy
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1760, and seven others following over the next 10 years. It was not always highly thought of by other writers (Samuel Johnson responded that, "Nothing odd will do long"[1]), but its bawdy humour was popular with London society.
Sterne's text is filled with allusions and references to the leading thinkers and writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Pope, Locke, and Swift were all major influences on Sterne and Tristram Shandy. It's easy to see that the satires of Pope and Swift formed much of the humour of Tristram Shandy, but Swift's sermons and Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding contributed ideas and frameworks that Sterne explored throughout his novel. Sterne's engagement with the science and philosophy of his day was extensive, however, and the sections on obstetrics and fortifications, for instance, indicate that he had a grasp of the main issues then current in those fields.
Four influences on Tristram Shandy overshadow all others: Rabelais, Cervantes, Montaigne's Essays and John Locke. Sterne had written an earlier piece called A Rabelaisian Fragment, which indicates his familiarity with the work of the French monk. But the earlier work is not needed to see the influence of Rabelais on Tristram Shandy, which is evident in multiple allusions, as well as in the overall tone of bawdy humor centered on the body. The first scene in Tristram Shandy, where Tristram's mother interrupts his father during the sex that leads to Tristram's conception, testifies to Sterne's debt to Rabelais.
The shade of Cervantes is similarly present throughout Sterne's novel. The frequent references to Rosinante, the character of Uncle Toby (who resembles Don Quixote in many ways) and Sterne's own description of his characters' "Cervantic humour," along with the genre-defying structure of Tristram Shandy, which owes much to the second part of Cervantes' novel, all demonstrate the influence of Cervantes.
The novel also makes brilliant use of John Locke's theories of empiricism, or the way we assemble what we know of ourselves and our world from the "association of ideas" that come to us from our five senses. Sterne is by turns respectful and satirical of Locke's theories, using the association of ideas to construct characters' "hobby-horses," or whimsical obsessions, that both order and disorder their lives in different ways. It also owes a significant intertextual debt to Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, Swift's Battle of the Books, and the Scriblerian collaborative work, The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus.
The novel, as it stands, is seen by some as an elaborate and ingeniously-executed pun. Today, the novel is seen as a forerunner of later stream of consciousness, self-reflexive and postmodern writing.
Characters to associate with Tristram Shandy include Walter and Toby who together account for the bulk of the book's ideas and actions.
A few famous passages:
It begins:
I WISH either my father or my mother,
or indeed both of them, as they
were in duty both equally bound to it,
had minded what they were about when
they begot me; had they duly consider'd
how much depended upon what they
were then doing; -- that not only the
production of a rational Being was con-
cern'd in it, but that possibly the happy
formation and temperature of his body,
perhaps his genius and the very cast of
his mind ; -- and, for aught they knew
to the contrary, even the fortunes of his
whole house might take their turn from
the humours and dispositions which were
then uppermost : ---- Had they duly
weighed and considered all this, and
proceeded accordingly, ---- I am verily
persuaded I should have made a quite
different figure in the world, from that,
in which the reader is likely to see me.
Another famous line:
"writing, when properly managed, is but another name for conversation,"