The many insights of this book's particular readings are fascinating and will doubtless provoke and encourage new work on Tristram Shandy.

Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Keymer's book, in short, is something of a wonder, a sharply original and consistently eye-opening and provocative rereading of a novel that I thought I knew pretty well ... Keymer opens a substantially new understanding of Sterne as first and foremost an eighteenth-century writer. He has reinstated Sterne as a man of his complicated historical moment.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

... high standards of insight and originality characterize this book.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Se alle

... steady brilliance and exemplary historical scholarship.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Keymer has a wonderful sense of the shape and swing of novelistic production in these decades, and his achievement is to locate Sterne's novel squarely within that field, to trace its targets and to chart its origins and its transformation of those aims and sources.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

As well as by scholars of Sterne and of mid-eighteenth-century British culture, the study should also be warmly welcomed by readers interested in the early history of the novel; the available scholarship on which tends to cut out at mid-century, with just the occasional, uneasy glance towards Sterne.

The Irish University Review

With a tremendous sureness of touch, Keymer has produced a substantial contextual analysis which incorporates important new accounts of the contexts themselves: experimental fiction of the 1750s; the early history of serial publication; literary vogues of the 1760s. For the reader familiar with the essays and articles in which he has explored some of these themes over the last decade, not least among the pleasures of Keymer's book is the seamless manner in which it ties together these apparently disparate concerns.

The Irish University Review

... an impressively detailed, richly illuminating study.

The Irish University Review

Keymer's own study makes a detailed and compelling case for viewing Tristram within the culture of its 'immediate day', and as a text 'profoundly of its time'.

The Irish University Review

Keymer resists conclusions; indeed, the ends of his chapters tend to anticipate the next rather than rounding things up. This open-endedness is a manifestation of Keymer's stimulating open-mindedness and quite appropriate for his subject.

Essays in Criticism

Keymer's treatment of time in the novel is brilliant ... Keymer is to be congratulated on an innovative and engrossing study.

English Studies

...a gift for beautiful and sharply observant prose, and more than that, a quickness of intelligence that illuminates everything he touches on.

Studies in English Literature

Keymer deepens our understanding both of the ways in which Sterne's experiments with novelistic resources are grounded in mid-eighteenth-century conventions and tropes and of how Sterne appeals far beyond the eighteenth century to our own absorption in the problems of representation and indeterminacy. In its breadth, elegance, and economy this is exemplary work.

Studies in English Literature

The author of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is often seen as an anachronism - a belated exponent of learned-wit satire whose kinship is with Montaigne, or a proto-modernist whose narrative pyrotechnics anticipate Joyce. Yet to many contemporaries Sterne's writing was emphatically of its immediate time, a voguish compound of all things modern that seemed to typify, if not indeed constitute, a 'Shandy-Age'. In this historicizing study, Thomas Keymer demonstrates the self-conscious imbrication of Tristram Shandy in the diverse literary culture of its extended moment. Not only absorbing but also updating Swift's Tale of a Tub, Sterne's text turns the satirical resources of Scriblerian writing on the post-Scriblerian literary marketplace, and above all on that quintessentially modern genre, the novel itself. For all its anticipation of later trends, his play on narrative representation, linguistic indeterminacy, the unruliness of reading and the materiality of text turns out to be firmly grounded in the conventions and tropes of mid-eighteenth-century fiction. Through the mechanisms of improvisatory serialization, Sterne could also engage with other new texts and trends as they continued to emerge, including 'Nonsense Club' satire, the Ossianic vogue, and debates about the Seven Years War.
Les mer
'Tristram is the Fashion', Sterne gleefully wrote of his masterpiece, 'Tristram Shandy', in 1760. This study reads Sterne's writing alongside other trends and texts of the time, showing how Sterne created and sustained his own vogue through self-conscious play on his rivals' work.
Les mer
List of illustrations ; List of abbreviations ; Introduction ; I. NARRATIVE DISCOURSE AND PRINT CULTURE FROM PAMELA TO TRISTRAM SHANDY ; 1. Sterne and the 'new species of writing' ; 2. Novels, print, and meaning ; II. THE SERIALIZATION OF TRISTRAM SHANDY ; 3. The practice and poetics of serial fiction ; 4. Serializing a self ; III. STERNE IN THE LITERARY CULTURE OF THE 1760S ; 5. Tristram Shandy and the freshest moderns ; 6. The literature of Whiggism and the politics of war
Les mer
`In arguing for a more rigorous historicist approach in our readings of Tristram Shandy, Keymer's book has implications for the wider debates about the 'postmodernity' of eighteenth-century literature in particular and about historicism within literary studies more generally.' Eighteenth-Century Ireland `...eloquent testimony to the ways in which mid-seventeeth-century disturbances continued to stir mid-eighteenth-century texts.' Studies in English Literature
Les mer
Highlights Sterne's influence on the literary culture of the 1760s
Thomas Keymer is Elmore Fellow and Tutor in English at St Anne's College, Oxford and Lecturer in English Language and Literature, University of Oxford. He is the author of Richardson's Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (CUP 1992); editor of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings (Everyman 1994), Henry Fielding's The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (Penguin 1996); and co-editor of the six volumes of The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, 1740-1750 (Pickering and Chatto 2001), Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (World's Classics 2001), Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Shamela (World's Classics 1999), and volume 1 of Prefaces, Postscripts, and Related Writings of Samuel Richardson (Pickering and Chatto 1998).
Les mer
Highlights Sterne's influence on the literary culture of the 1760s

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780199245925
Publisert
2002
Utgiver
Oxford University Press
Vekt
395 gr
Høyde
224 mm
Bredde
144 mm
Dybde
18 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
236

Forfatter

Biografisk notat

Thomas Keymer is Elmore Fellow and Tutor in English at St Anne's College, Oxford and Lecturer in English Language and Literature, University of Oxford. He is the author of Richardson's Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (CUP 1992); editor of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings (Everyman 1994), Henry Fielding's The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (Penguin 1996); and co-editor of the six volumes of The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, 1740-1750 (Pickering and Chatto 2001), Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (World's Classics 2001), Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Shamela (World's Classics 1999), and volume 1 of Prefaces, Postscripts, and Related Writings of Samuel Richardson (Pickering and Chatto 1998).