Sterne among the Philosophes: Body and Soul in A Sentimental Journey
Martin C. Battestin, University of Virginia
Volume 7, no. 1, October 1994
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
To borrow Dr Johnson’s epithet, Laurence Sterne, no less than his masterpiece, was decidedly an “odd” case. On the one hand, Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is a funny book — the most inventively impudent work of bawdy wit in the language. Yet it is the first novel in English seriously to explore the disturbing implications of the new empiricist philosophies of Locke and Hartley and Hume — a narrative that, both in the absurdities of its formlessness and in the solipsism and impotence of its characters, seems profoundly modern. Leo Spitzer once remarked that the middle decades of the eighteenth century comprised “the great caesura” in the history of Western thought — the moment when a harmonious tradition of classical and Christian thought that began with Pythagoras came to an end and the Modern age began: the age that has discarded belief in spiritual realities and providential order in favour of materialism, subjectivism, and (with respect to the polity) egalitarianism.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Sterne” include:
Consuming Indians: Tsonnonthouan, Colonialism, and the Commodification of Culture
by ROBBIE RICHARDSON (ECF 22.4, Spring 2010)
The Literary History of the Sash Window
by RACHEL RAMSEY (ECF 22.2, Winter 2009-10)
Talking Coins and Thinking Smoke-Jacks: Satirizing Materialism in Gildon and Sterne
by SCOTT NOWKA (ECF 22.2, Winter 2009-10)
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