Textual and Critical Intersections

Inthis collection of essays representing fifty years of scholarship on LaurenceSterne, Melvyn New brings Sterne into conversation with other authors—both hiscontemporaries, such as James Boswell and Samuel Richardson, and modernists,such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

Newbegins by focusing on Sterne’s texts and their sources, discussing the purposesof his famous borrowings from past writings, his Anglicanism, and his relianceon John Norris of Bemerton. This section concludes with an argument for theremoval from Sterne’s canon of “The Unknown World.” New then offers severalreadings based on placing diverse texts in proximity: Charles Dickens’s Dombeyand Son alongside the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and Samuel Johnson’s “London”against T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Thefinal section offers several proximate readings of Sterne alongside hiscontemporaries, Jonathan Swift, Richardson, and Boswell, and modernist authors andtexts—Proust, Bruno Schulz, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Joyce’s APortrait of the Artist as a Young Man.