Monday the 12th
Laurence Sterne Books
A Political Romance (1759), A Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais (1759), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1776), A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
Laurence Sterne Links
Tristan Shandy Website
Site http://www.tristramshandyweb.it/search/search.html
The Tristram Shandy Web was originally conceived by Patrizia Nerozzi Bellman, who's Full Professor of English Literature at IULM University of Milan, Dean of the Faculty of Modern Languages, Literature and Culture and Head of the Humanities Laboratory. The work began in May 2000, starting with the acquisition of the text. Professor Masaru Uchida (Gifu University - Japan) kindly accorded us the permission to use his html version - which has been on the net for three years now - work on it and put it into a hypertextual edition. We are also extremely grateful to Professor Diana Patterson (Mt Royal College - Canada), who first deposited the original SGML version of the text at the Oxford Text Archive. It's our main reference for a correct proof reading.
Laurence Sterne in Cyberspace
Site http://www.gifu-u.ac.jp/~masaru/Sterne_on_the_Net.html
Directory of websites related to the works and life of Sterne
Sterne, Laurence
Site http://www.bartleby.com/65/st/Sterne-L.html
1713–68, English author, b. Ireland. Educated at Cambridge, he entered the Anglican church and was given the living of Sutton-in-the-Forest, Yorkshire, in 1738, where he remained until 1759. He came to London the following year and was a great social success. Unhappily married, he was involved with various women during his lifetime, most notably Mrs. Eliza Draper, for whom he wrote the Journal to Eliza (1767). He led a somewhat dissolute life and much of the time was plagued by ill health, dying finally of tuberculosis. In 1760 the first volume of his masterpiece Tristram Shandy appeared. Although it was denounced on moral and literary grounds by Dr. Johnson, Horace Walpole, and others, the book was a popular success and eight subsequent volumes followed (1761–67). As a result of his travels to the Continent (1762–66) he wrote, but left unfinished, A Sentimental Journey (1768). He also published in his lifetime several volumes of sermons. One of the most entertaining and original literary works in English, Tristram Shandy is, in a sense, a parody of a novel. It is a hodgepodge of character sketches, blank pages, dramatic action, transposed chapters, and various digressions. Sterne constantly obtrudes himself into the novel and is by turns witty, satiric, sentimental, knowledgeable, and obscene. Beneath this apparent chaos, however, is a structure based on the association of ideas. In Tristram Shandy Sterne enlarged the scope of the novel from the mere recording of external incidents to the depiction of a complex of internal impressions, thoughts, and feelings.
Laurence Sterne - Literary Encyclopedia
Site http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5143
Laurence Sterne has often been claimed as a precursor of modernist experiment, the comic play of his writing anticipating the work of James Joyce or the formal ironies of postmodern textuality. Yet the extraordinary “legacy of myself” he created for posterity is one rooted in the pressures, uncertainties and desires of eighteenth-century life which found a uniquely self-reflexive form in his narratives. He was born in a military barracks in Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland, the eldest of seven children, the majority of whom did not live beyond infancy. His father, Roger Sterne, was the younger son of an eminent family who numbered renowned ecclesiastics amongst its ancestors, including Richard Sterne, Master of Jesus College Cambridge, who became Archbishop of York in the late seventeenth century. The family had an estate near Halifax in Yorkshire to which Roger’s elder brother succeeded, another branch settling successfully in Ireland, and both sides would at crucial moments financially sustain Laurence Sterne’s early years. Roger Sterne had limited prospects and was not good with money. He had impetuously enlisted in the army as an ensign, failed to win a commission, and made an unadvantageous marriage to a Captain’s widow, Agnes Hobert (possibly, according to the novelist’s memoir, because he was in debt to her father). The birth of Laurence Sterne was marked by financial crisis for his parents, occasioned by the disbanding of the army in 1713 following the Treaty of Utrecht (the peace brokered by the Tories at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession). It was an event that stitched Sterne’s personal story to the warp and weft of eighteenth-century political and imperial history in ways that he would later come to represent in the Shandean generations of his first novel.
Laurence Sterne - Bibliomania
Site http://www.bibliomania.com/0/5/178/frameset.html
Novelist, son of an officer in the army, and the great-grandson of an Archbishop of York, was born at Clonmel, where his father’s regiment happened to be stationed, and passed part of his boyhood in Ireland. At the age of 10 he was handed over to a relation, Mr. Sterne of Elvington in Yorkshire, who put him to school at Halifax, and thereafter sent him to Cambridge He entered the Church, a profession for which he was very indifferently fitted, and through family influence procured the living of Sutton, Yorkshire. In 1741 he m. a lady—Miss Lumley—whose influence obtained for him in addition an adjacent benefice, and he also became a prebendary of York. It was not until 1760 that the first two vols. of his famous novel, Tristram Shandy, appeared. Its peculiar and original style of humour, its whimsicality, and perhaps also its defiance of conventionality, and even its frequent lapses into indecorum, achieved for it an immediate and immense popularity. S. went up to London and became the lion of the day. The third and fourth vols. appeared in 1761, the fifth and sixth in 1762, the seventh and eighth in 1765, and the last in 1767.
Laurence Sterne Trust
Site http://www.let.uu.nl/~peter.devoogd/shandean/trust.html
The Laurence Sterne Trust. The Trust was established by formal deed on 16th March 1967. The principal objects as stated within the Trust deed are to acquire and maintain the freehold of Shandy Hall, Coxwold. To install and maintain therein as large and comprehensive a collection as possible of the works of Laurence Sterne, together with other related documents, prints and pictures, and to permanently display those works and to keep them open to the public. The Trust is a registered charity, number 529593.
Laurence Sterne
Site http://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/college/history/sterne.html
Laurence Sterne (1713-68), the author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, was the great-grandson of Richard Sterne, Archbishop of York and Master of Jesus College. Laurence's father, Roger Sterne, was a soldier who served as an officer in Flanders under the Duke of Marlborough. His mother, Agnes, was the widow of a fellow officer, who married Roger Sterne while he was on campaign in Dunkirk in 1711. Laurence was born on 24 November 1713 at Clonmel in County Tipperary, where his father's regiment was stationed. He spent his childhood wandering from place to place in Ireland and England, following in the wake of his father's regiment. Military life was to furnish Sterne with some of his most notable comic characters, especially Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim and Lieutenant Le Fever in Tristram Shandy.
Laurence Sterne
Site http://www.laurencesterne.com
Laurence Sterne is an Anglo-Irish novelist, born on 24 November 1713 at Clonmel. His father Roger Sterne, was a soldier and served as an officer during the War of the Spanish Sequence. Laurence did his studies at Yorkshire. In 1736 he took his B.A. degree and continued M.A. In 1759 Sterne wrote and published the first two volumes of his strange and significant comic novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman are the most humorous books in the entire catalog of literature.
"We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence."
W. B. Yeats, speech in the Irish Senate, June 11, 1925