Sterne Studies at the Tercentenary

These three excellent collections on Laurence Sterne arrive just as his tercentenary is upon us, presenting us with a welcome opportunity to take stock of the field. The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, edited by Thomas Keymer, comprises twelve specially commissioned essays by leading Sterne authorities from both sides of the Atlantic, and bills itself as "the first collection of essays to analyse the full range of Sterne's published output." It succeeds exceptionally well at balancing its twin aims of providing a richly contextualized overview of Sterne's writings that is both accessible to newcomers and of interest to longtime Sterneans. Swiftly Sterneward: Essays on Laurence Sterne and His Times in Honor of Melvyn New, edited by W. B. Gerard, E. Derek Taylor, and Robert G. Walker—all former students of Professor New—offers reading pleasures of a very different sort. Where the Companion, with its handbook aspirations, is moderate and reference-like, the Festschrift is spirited, eclectic, and adventurous. Though only half of the volume is devoted specifically to Sterne, it constitutes a significant addition to the field. Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Laurence Sterne, also edited by W. B. Gerard, ratifies and no doubt will help advance the growing scholarly interest in Sterne's homiletic writings and the ongoing reexamination of the role religion played in his major works of fiction. Each of these collections makes a valuable contribution to Sterne studies, and together they provide hints of its future direction.

In its very moderation and evenhandedness, the Cambridge Companion can be seen as quietly turning the page on some long-standing critical quarrels. "Sterne scholarship has always been a divided field," Peter de Voogd observes, with debates tending to oscillate "between two extremes" (157). This is precisely what does not happen in the present volume, which more often eschews stark either/or positions in favor of both/and forms of argumentation. This is most evident in Elizabeth W. Harries's "Words, Sex, and Gender in Sterne's Novels," a thoughtful reconsideration of Sterne's alleged antifeminism. After remarking that Tristram's "is a world where women, their hopes, and their opinions are relegated to the margins" (114), Harries presents the critical case for Sterne's misogyny, with Juliet McMaster and Paula Loscocco acting for the defense (to which one might also add Melvyn New), and Ruth Perry and Harries's younger self for the prosecution. With wonderful candor, Harries uses her Companion essay to walk back from her former position on Tristram, doing so in a way that also seeks to complicate the terms of the debate: "I no longer believe that the novel has an unambiguous 'sexist bias'; I think that it both shores up and questions cultural myths about gender" (121, her emphasis). Similar logic is at work in Judith Hawley's "Tristram Shandy, Learned Wit, and Enlightenment Knowledge," which views the novel as exhibiting both Renaissance satirical and modern empirical attitudes toward knowledge production. It is also apparent in Christopher Fanning's astute "Sterne and Print Culture," which refuses the temptations of either/or thinking from the very beginning: "What does it mean that Laurence Sterne, a generation later, could both admire and imitate the Sciblerians and yet take on a campaign of public self-promotion like Cibber?" (126). These essays deftly negotiate some perennially thorny issues in Sterne scholarship, and in the process they open up new avenues of exploration.

The question of Tristram Shandy's generic identity is another case in point. Melvyn New's first book, Laurence Sterne as Satirist (1969), famously argued that Tristram is more profitably read as Scriblerian satire than as novelistic fiction, an argument that...