Laurence Sterne
Longman Critical Readers Series

The eighteenth century was a period when the modern Novel emerged through the work of writers such as Laurence Sterne (1713-68), Richardson, Defoe, Fielding and Johnson. However, the writing of Sterne is recognised as influencing modern writing from Joyce and Woolf onwards more than any of the other eighteenth century novelists.In the last twenty years Sterne's work has become a focus for a flourishing body of work and significant debates in many new and developing areas of literary theory which include gender, sexuality, postmodernism, and deconstruction. Sterne's major novel 'Tristram Shandy' is regarded as deploying a range of 'post-modern literary devices' expected to be found in late twentieth century work rather than in work written in the 1700s. This volume combines the most interesting and stimulating recent critical thinking about Sterne and represents recent theoretical and critical debates surrounding Sterne's writing.

Introduction Part I: Sociality and Sensibility 1. Sexualism and the Citizen of the World: Wycherley, Sterne and Male Homosexual Desire 2. Laurence Sterne and the "Sociality" of the Novel Part II: Feminism/Gender/Sexualities 3. Words for Sex: The Verbal-Sexual Continuum in Tristram Shandy 4. Job's Wife and Sterne's Other Women Part III: Sterne and the Body 5. "Uncrystalized Flesh and Blood": The Body in Tristram Shandy 6. Running out of Matter: The Body Exercised in Eighteenth-Century Fiction Part IV: Sources, Imitation, Plagiarism 7. Sterne, Burton, and Ferriar: Allusions to the Anatomy of Melancholy in Volumes V to IX of Tristram Shandy 8. Sterne's System of Imitation Part V: Narrative and Form 9. Narrative Middles: a Preliminary Outline 10. On Sterne's Page: Spatial Layout, Spatial Form, and Social Spaces in Tristram Shandy Notes on authors Further reading Index

Marcus Walsh is Professor of English Literature at the Univeristy of Birmingham. He has written extensively on Smart, Swift, Johnson and Stern. Publications include Christopher Smart: Poetical Works Vols I and II, (OUP 1983, 1987), and Shakespeare, Milton and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing (CUP 1997).

• Wide-ranging and accessible introduction provides broad survey of writing on Sterne.
• Volume covers whole range of theoretical approaches, organised in five thematic, easy-to-follow sections.
• Each section prefaced by discussion of critical debate.
• Each section provides pair of theoretically contrasting essays - gives reader sense of the debate.
• Includes comprehensive and extensively-annotated list of Further Reading for students to follow up own research.