Textual and Critical Intersections (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

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.