A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine's Journal, vol. 6, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (review)

332 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION16:2 et le Système de religion naturelle des Difficultés présentent des affinités étonnantes à propos des attributs de Dieu, de la liberté humaine, de la métempsychose (M. Benitez). Comparer la métiiode suivie dans ce traité, pour établirla connaissance de Dieu par la raison, avec la démarche de Malebranche aboutit à voir en Challe un «héritier infidèle» (p. 407) de l'Oratorien (A.-R. N'Diaye). Si l'on s'interroge sur le rayonnement de Challe, on peut constater que l'utilisation et la diffusion, par Voltaire, du Militaire philosophe de 1767 prouvent qu'il en avait bien mesuré la force et l'originalité (F. Bessire). Chez Challe également, les références à la Bible, malgré une constance, à travers toute l'œuvre, dans le choix des textes bibliques, se caractérisent par une tension entre répulsion et attirance (G. Artigas-Menant). On le voit, nous avons là des études d'une grande diversité, vers lesquelles nous souhaitons que ces brefs aperçus attirent de nombreux lecteurs. Marie-Hélène Cotoni Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis Laurence Sterne. A SentimentalJourney through France and Italy and Continuation ofthe Bramine'sJournal, vol. 6, The Florida Edition ofthe Works ofLaurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New and W.G. Day. Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 2002. ISBN 0-8130-1771-8. This new edition ofA SentimentalJourney, published in tandem with the work more commonly known as theJournal toEliza, appears some thirty-diree years after Melvyn New began editing The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the first instalment (3 volumes; 1978-84) ofthe continuing Florida Edition of the Works ofLaurence Sterne, which also includes the Sermons (2 volumes; 1996). Like its predecessors, the volume under review offers a great deal more than Sterne's texts, which as before are presented "clean." Here, the texts amount tojust 225 ofthe volume's 639 pages, which also include an introduction, extensive and discursive annotation, and a series of textual appendices. The seriousness of intent of so scholarly and long-lived an enterprise is nowhere in doubt. What dien does die present volume offer the student ofSterne, and how does it compare with its predecessors in method and achievement? For a start, what the editors seek to provide is something more than the sum of two separate works by Sterne (one designed for, and achieving, publication—just—in Sterne's lifetime, the other a work unknown until the late nineteenth century, whose very status is debatable). Here, the undoubted REVIEWS333 and intriguing connection between the two works is pushed to—and perhaps beyond—extremes. Diverging from Gardner D. Stout, Jr, editor of the valuable University ofCalifornia Press A SentimentalJourney (1967), New and Day argue that "Stout did not believe the chronological and thematic relationships betweenJournal andJourney were essential to a reading of the latter. Our own presentation ofthe two texts in a single volume of the Florida Edition is based on die contrary belief—namely that A SentimentalJourney cannot be sufficiendy understood without the context supplied by Bromine's JournaV (p. xxvii) . In so arguing, the editors set themselves very deliberately against not merely Stout but most, ifnot all, previous commentators (to say nothing of readers) , playing down the relationship between Sterne's own travels through France and Italy and the Journey, in favour of a connection —based on a shared concern with mortality—with the sequence ofletters written to Eliza Draper following her departure for India in mid-April 1767, that the often gravely ill author continued, increasingly fitfully, until 1 November. Whether or not one is wholly convinced, the argument has some merit, especially as put forward here, with the editors declaring—in relation to the second part of theJourney that the author was preventing from writing by his deadi—that it is probably an error to suggest that, for Sterne, touring Italy would have been different from touring France: "The raw materials of his travels ultimately do not seem to be the 'necessary cause' of his writing" (p. xviii). That the Journey cannot be "sufficiendy understood" unless read alongside the Bromine'sJournalis perhaps a litde less susceptible ofdemonstration , especially given the very different status of...