
Textual and Critical Intersections
Conversations with Laurence Sterne and Others
Melvyn New(Author)
University Press of Florida
Published on 12. December 2023
Book
Hardback
398 pages
978-0-8130-6983-8 (ISBN)
Description
In this collection of essays representing fifty years of scholarship on Laurence Sterne, Melvyn New brings Sterne into conversation with other authors-both his contemporaries, such as James Boswell and Samuel Richardson, and modernists, such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce.
New begins by focusing on Sterne's texts and their sources, discussing the purposes of his famous borrowings from past writings, his Anglicanism, and his reliance on John Norris of Bemerton. This section concludes with an argument for the removal from Sterne's canon of "The Unknown World." New then offers several readings based on placing diverse texts in proximity, Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son alongside the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and Samuel Johnson's "London" against T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The final section offers several proximate readings of Sterne alongside his contemporaries, Jonathan Swift, Richardson, and Boswell, and modernist authors and texts-Proust, Bruno Schulz, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
As he brings these varied authors together, New suggests that literary greatness inheres in the uncertainties and mysteries-in the words of Keats-of works proven capable of attracting thoughtful attention over varying times and wide spaces. He encourages the continued teaching of these challenging texts in the future of literary studies.
New begins by focusing on Sterne's texts and their sources, discussing the purposes of his famous borrowings from past writings, his Anglicanism, and his reliance on John Norris of Bemerton. This section concludes with an argument for the removal from Sterne's canon of "The Unknown World." New then offers several readings based on placing diverse texts in proximity, Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son alongside the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and Samuel Johnson's "London" against T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The final section offers several proximate readings of Sterne alongside his contemporaries, Jonathan Swift, Richardson, and Boswell, and modernist authors and texts-Proust, Bruno Schulz, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
As he brings these varied authors together, New suggests that literary greatness inheres in the uncertainties and mysteries-in the words of Keats-of works proven capable of attracting thoughtful attention over varying times and wide spaces. He encourages the continued teaching of these challenging texts in the future of literary studies.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Florida
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 28 mm
Weight
795 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8130-6983-8 (9780813069838)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
11/2023
1st Edition
University Press of Florida
€167.99
Available for download
Person
Melvyn New, professor emeritus of English at the University of Florida, is the general editor of the nine-volume Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne. He is coeditor of the four-volume Sir Charles Grandison in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson.