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134 rative reading of his novel, with a final detour into the countless remakings of Crusoe’s legend. Mr. Capoferro retails sources (travel and Puritan literature, diaries , sermons,allegoricaltales)andwanders into the territories of nineteenthcentury utopias as well as (post)modern dystopias; little slips through his lucid and masterful net. At its simplest, the Guida counterbalances a traditionally philological examination of the novel—genesis, historical resonances and social transpositions, standard situations and types—and a semiotic screening of the codes and embedded significances that, as it were, releases it from space and time limits.From a transhistorical,‘‘simultaneous’’pointof view, Crusoe reads like a protean, openended fable in which the civilized Western hero may even be made to convert to primitivism or abdicate his reign, only to die on the way back ‘‘home’’in the wake of Conrad’s Kurtz, ‘‘ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorabletime.’’The postcolonial politics of ironic displacement , informing such sequels as Michael Tournier’s Vendredi and Coetzee’s Foe, compellingly carve out a new figurative role for Friday, the self-assertive pioneer ’s marginalized Other. Here is the stemming of yet another story. Laura Giovannelli University of Pisa LAURENCE STERNE. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick , ed. Paul Goring. London: Penguin, 2001. Pp. xxxvi ⫹ 135. $7 (paper). LAURENCE STERNE. A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings, ed. Ian Jack and Tim Parnell. Oxford: Oxford, 2003. Pp. xliv ⫹ 262. $5.95 (paper). In 1967, Gardner D. Stoutpublishedan edition of A Sentimental Journey that served a generation of scholars as the text and annotations to be consulted prior to any additional commentary on Sterne’s final fiction. In the same year, Penguin published a trade edition, edited by Graham Petrie, who, obviously, could make no use of Stout’s fine textual and explanatory scholarship. A year later, Mr. Jack published his trade edition, which included The Journal to Eliza and Political Romance; he acknowledged the work of Stout, although clearly was too far along (‘‘in proof’’ he writes in an acknowledgment ) to make much—if any—use of it. Hence, for some thirty-five years the scholarly work of the Stout edition rarely if ever filtered down to undergraduate readers. Indeed, these trade editions— and Sterneans are hardly the only culpable scholars in this regard—have served too often as the cited text in scholarly books and articles. History repeats itself.In2001,Penguin Classics published a new edition of A Sentimental Journey, one year before the Florida edition was published. Mr. Goring , the editor, acknowledges this work in progress, but Penguin Classics, which had previously published a trade edition of Tristram Shandy based on the Florida edition, seems not to have suggested consultation , and Mr. Goring seems also to have found no reason to inquire as to the progress of the Florida edition. I do not know why this edition was published in so untimely a fashion. In 2003, Mr. Parnell published a new edition of Journey for Oxford University Press; it contains, along with the Journey, Sterne’s Journal to Eliza (an inappropriatedesignation,really , for what Sterne himself named Bramine ’s Journal), A Political Romance, and, most usefully, five sermons. Therole of Mr. Jack in this new edition would appear to have been nominal at best. It is 135 the trade edition to use (unfortunately, Tom Keymer’s Everyman edition (1994) was allowed to go out of print, seemingly within weeks of its publication). Although Mr. Parnell graciously acknowledges the helpfulness of the Florida editors , he was ‘‘unable to make use of the forthcoming Florida edition.’’ To some extent, then, another generation of students (and scholars) will not have what might have been so readily provided had academic publishing been a seamless enterprise from scholarship to trade editions —ready access to a full and updated scholarly edition. Publishing a trade edition without access to a scholarly edition that is known to be in preparation seems to me not a very good idea. One result can be bad texts. Fortunately , Sentimental Journey does not have too many difficulties; a very haphazard collation turned up two substantive errors , both in the Oxford text: p. 49, ‘‘size was little’’ should read ‘‘size...

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