Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne ed. by Melvyn New, Peter de Voogd, Judith Hawley

This collection of thirteen essays emerging from the 2013 Sterne Tercente-nary Conference gathers an international medley of Sterneans both seasoned and new to the field. It stands as evidence of the variety of approaches that Sterne’s writings invite and affirms their depth and continuing interest.

An anthology cleverly divided into three subsections entitled “Sterne,” “Tristram,” and “Yorick,” the volume operates more powerfully as a collection of intriguing insights than as a cohesive whole. The introduction, by Pat Rogers, contextualizes these essays with a history of Sterne’s critical reception, reduced to a token summary; to this is added a few reflections on the 1968 conference marking the bicentenary of the author’s death that resulted in the collection The Winged Skull, as well as a useful overview of the present volume’s contents. Rogers touches on the absence of editor Melvyn New’s confrontational conference plenary (vii), which, we discover in the latter’s contributor’s note, “was censored out of this collection by readers for the University of Delaware Press” (267). (The text appears in The Shandean 26 [2015].) Perhaps, in an aptly Sternean twist, meaning can be derived from absence.

In the opening chapter of part 1, “Sterne,” Tom Keymer speculates about the “so-called subjective turn of eighteenth-century culture” (6) and issues of self-definition in Sterne’s texts before merging these notions with the author’s creation of self within an emergent celebrity-oriented society. Moving astutely through the texts, Keymer weaves an allusive and revealing argument connecting the public Sterne and Rousseau’s “social performances of self” (19), alongside Sterne’s two fictions and the autobiographical Confessions.

Pairing the role of Bohemia in Sterne’s life with his wife Elizabeth’s response to his seven years of literary celebrity, Elizabeth Kraft also bridges the textual with the autobiographical. The disrupted tale of the King of Bohemia and his seven castles is tied to Mrs. Sterne’s supposed fantasy that she was “Queen of Bohemia,” a tale propagated by her dubious contemporary, John Croft. This unexpected pairing evolves suggestively into a discussion of the notion of being “bohemian.” Continuing this biographical thread, John Owen Havard uses Sterne’s vague participation in political campaigns with his uncle Jaques in the early 1740s to create a political lens for viewing his major works; for instance, Tristram Shandy can be seen “as a satire on the very premise of taking sides” (43). This leads Havard to several inventive pairings between history and fiction, some dependent on murky claims; for example, his statement that Sterne was “quite concerned with the wider restructuring of political commitments and expectations” (47) is bereft of adequate documentary support.

In this section’s final chapter, Christoph Henke employs the eighteenth-century idea of “common sense” to assess Tristram Shandy, capably investigating its literary, religious, political, and intellectual foundations before thoughtfully mining Sterne’s work for evidence. Henke’s assertion of the essential commonsensical qualities of and between the characters leads to the broader point of the centrality of subjectivity, nicely (if incidentally) linking his readings to Keymer’s opening essay.

Donald R. Wehrs begins part 2, “Tristram,” by summoning Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Emmanuel Levinas (among others) to assess the somewhat contradictory elements of satire and grace in Sterne’s work, skillfully applying a blend of Western humanistic philosophies with an enlightening use of affective considerations to help unravel the author’s ethics. Wehrs notes, for instance, the readerly act of “experiencing imaginatively an affective registering . . . impressing somatic empathy on ethical consciousness in ways that Sterne links with grace speaking within and through nature” (92).

Examining the theme of birth in Tristram Shandy, Ashleigh Blackwood sees projections of uncertainty in the attitudes of Walter, Toby, and Dr. Slop, as well as links to contemporaneous obstetrical texts that combine to offer “an array of cultural inconsistencies that reveal the halting process of acclimatizing...