“Alas, Poor Yorick!”: Elegiac Friendship in Tristram Shandy

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (5) ◽  
pp. 1450-1456
Author(s):  
George E. Haggerty
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Death Scene ◽  
Tristram Shandy ◽  
Comic Novel ◽  
Direct Reflection ◽  
The Way

Not far into the first volume of laurence sterne's tristram shandy, we are presented with the death scene of yorick, the country parson who plays a central role in the novel. Yorick has barely made his appearance before his death is lamented in one of the novel's most arresting passages. This death scene is unexpected and out of sync with the way the story has been told so far. Readers are not yet aware that events transpire according to a system all their own; nor do they realize that in Tristram Shandy death is implicit in the lives of its characters as perhaps in no other novel, certainly no other comic novel, of the last half of the eighteenth century. Of course, in Tristram Shandy there is no law about when things happen or how they relate to matters around them, except some supple notion of memory and the association of ideas, as articulated by John Locke. Still, Sterne, who uses the self-effacing parson to represent himself, has made no bones about his ill health and how short a time he has for writing his novel, and in that sense this scene could be placed anywhere and it would be perfectly intelligible. One critic, at least, reads the novel as a direct reflection of Sterne's awareness of his own mortal illness.

Clothing and the oceanic identity in Melville’s Redburn

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 29-43
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Traber
Keyword(s):  
Outer Layer ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Visible Sign ◽  
The Way

Herman Melville’s Redburn approaches the topic of corporeal coding via the outer layer of clothing. Throughout the novel, the young protagonist consciously uses clothing as a means of self-representation and expression, deploying fashion to create and position himself in different contexts; for example, taking pride in his ragged clothes amongst well-dressed ship passengers becomes a form of social protest. But Redburn is also used to comic effect because his choices are often based on incorrect assumptions of propriety, such as his notion of the way a sailor is supposed to dress not matching the onboard reality. The rules of appearance that construct and restrain an identity are paradoxically bolstered at the same time they are broken, which allows Melville the opportunity to explore rebellion alongside the performative aspect of the self as a body constituting both a visible sign and a living vehicle for the mores, beliefs and ideologies that shape a society.

scholarly journals As mulheres do império: uma leitura de Ana de Amsterdam / Women’s Empire: A Reading of Ana de Amsterdam

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (61) ◽  
pp. 145
Author(s):  
Naira Almeida Nascimento
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
Second Moment ◽  
Her Family ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Work Narratives ◽  
The Way

Resumo: Enquadrado no bojo da produção identificada como “literatura dos retornados”, o interesse principal de Ana de Amsterdam (2016a), de Ana Cássia Rebelo, não recai nas imagens traumáticas do retorno ou na violência praticada entre colonizadores e colonizados, como é recorrente no gênero. De forma até sintomática, as lembranças de África são esporádicas na menina de cinco anos que deixou Moçambique junto à família. Em seu lugar, a exuberância de uma Índia portuguesa sonhada e projetada por ela ocupam as lacunas de um presente insatisfatório, dividido entre a criação dos três filhos de um casamento em crise e o emprego burocrático desempenhado numa Lisboa pouco atrativa. Em ambos, tanto na Goa portuguesa como no trajeto para o trabalho, despontam narrativas de mulheres que constituem a síntese entre o diário íntimo de Ana e a escrita testemunhal da diáspora. Numa primeira parte do estudo, recupera-se a gênese do romance no formato do blog assinado pela autora, evidenciando a “escrita do eu”, nos moldes dos estudos de autobiografias, diários e afins. O segundo momento volta-se para a escrita testemunhal no lastro da narrativa pós-colonial e também da pós-memória. Em comum, os dois planos tratam da perspectiva feminina, seja na batalha contemporânea da cosmopolita Lisboa, seja nos desdobramentos silenciados do pós-colonialismo, em meio às histórias duplicadas de outras tantas Anas.Palavras-chave: Ana de Amsterdam; Ana Cássia Rebelo; diário íntimo; literatura de testemunho; blogs.Abstract: Framed in the center of the production identified as “literature of the returnees”, the main focus of Ana de Amsterdam (2016a) by Ana Cássia Rebelo, does not lie in the traumatic images of the return or in the violence practiced between colonizers and colonized, as it is usually the case in this genre. Somehow, even symptomatically, African memories are sporadic in the five-year-old girl who left Mozambique with her family. Instead, the exuberance of a Portuguese India, dreamed and projected by her, occupies the gaps of an unsatisfactory present, dividing herself to raise three children of a marriage in crisis and work in the bureaucratic employment situated in an unattractive Lisbon. In both, Portuguese Goa and on the way to work, narratives of women emerge and represent the synthesis between Ana’s private diary and the testimonial writing of the diaspora. In a first part of the study, the genesis of the novel is recovered in the form of a blog signed by the author, emphasizing the “writing of the self”, in the molds of autobiographies, journals and etc. The second moment turns to the testimonial writing in the basis of the postcolonial narrative and also of the post-memory. In common, the two plans deal with the feminine perspective, whether in the contemporary battle of cosmopolitan Lisbon or in the silenced developments of postcolonialism, in the middle of the duplicate stories of so many Anas.Keywords: Ana de Amsterdam; Ana Cássia Rebelo; diary; testimonial literature; blogs.

“A book that all have heard of . . . but that nobody reads”

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-159
Author(s):  
Natasha Simonova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Academic Context ◽  
Absence Of Evidence ◽  
The Way

In 1804, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia was described as “a book that all have heard of, that some few possess, but that nobody reads.” Indeed, the usual critical narrative has Philip Sidney’s romance falling sharply out of fashion in the eighteenth century from its height in the mid-seventeenth, before being rediscovered within a limited academic context. This essay, however, finds value in charting the circulation and reception of this apparently “unpopular” and “outdated” work. Focusing on how Sidney’s Arcadia was published, refashioned, and read in the eighteenth century, rather than on how it was not, means more than simply disproving the absence of evidence. Rather, it sheds light on questions about the reception of Renaissance literature (beyond Shakespeare) in this period, the generic relationship between the romance and the novel, and the way that individual readers’ experiences help to transform and transmit particular texts forward through time.

‘Carving the Complete Edition’: Self-commentary, Poetry, and Illustration in the Early-Qing Erotic Novel Romance of an Embroidered Screen (1670)

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mengjun Li
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
Erotic Novel ◽  
Chinese Fiction ◽  
Large Corpus

Scholars of late imperial Chinese fiction have demonstrated that Ming ‘literati novels’ possessed both intellectual sophistication and aesthetic seriousness. Nonetheless, the large corpus of mid-length fictional narratives of the Qing remains mired in problematic assumptions about its ostensibly popular nature. The self-commentaried edition ofEmbroidered screen(Xiuping yuan) presents a salient example for reassessing the nature of Qing novels and the reading of fiction in the seventeenth century. First circulated in manuscript copies, extensive auto-commentary was added when the novel was committed to print. The commented edition incorporates different genres—poetry, examination essay, and anecdotal accounts—as well as visual elements, all intended to appeal to elite literati tastes among Qing readers. Its literary, visual, and formal heteroglossia also contributed to its popularity in eighteenth-century Japan, which in turn secured its preservation and eventual modern rediscovery, even while it fell into obscurity in Qing China, most likely due to political censorship.

Tristram Shandy and War Representation

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48
Author(s):  
John Richardson
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Tristram Shandy ◽  
Sympathetic Responses ◽  
The Way

This essay examines Tristram Shandy in the context of philosophers and thinkers such as Hume, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson, focusing on how the novel represents war, and how it raises questions about sympathetic responses to war. I will argue that Sterne is concerned with the challenges of representing war, which he explores in studying Uncle Toby and Trim’s miniature fortifications, as well as the story of Le Fever, and the various sympathetic reactions, some of which are self-promotional, to death. Sterne places two modes of representing war in counterpoint — a “distancing” mode that entails objective reporting, and a mode that involves an individual, sympathetic narrative — to raise questions about the emotion, beauty, and impact of war representations. I will also argue that Sterne is responding to changes in the way war was publicly imagined.

The Stage Career of Eliza Haywood

1964 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Elwood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Domestic Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Way

Female playwrights of varying degrees of quality were reasonably plentiful in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England; but, except for Eliza Haywood, few of these playwrights doubled as actresses, at least with sufficient success for us to be aware of their talents. Even the stage career of Mrs. Haywood, one extending at least from 1715 to 1737, has not been documented in its entirety before now. It deserves attention because it adds some details to the scanty biography of this woman who is best known as a novelist, a novelist who turned out scandal chronicles long before Richardson made the novel morally acceptable, and who in 1751 produced what may be the first domestic novel in English,The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. Along the way she had some success as a publisher, as the first woman writer of a periodical for women, as a poet, and as a playwright and actress. It was her efforts in the theater that drew the attention of such men as Jonathan Swift and Richard Savage and brought her into a rather lengthy association with Henry Fielding. And it was her theatrical experience that contributed much to her eventual skill as a novelist. She liked the stage, and much of what we like in her later work she owed to the stage.

scholarly journals A Multi-dimensional Representation of the Mid-Eighteenth Century England: The Vicar of Wakefield

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 648-653
Author(s):  
Kubra Baysal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Dimensional Representation ◽  
Oliver Goldsmith ◽  
The Way

Published in 1766, The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale is the only novel by Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, who starts his literary adventure as a hack writer. Reflecting the story through the parson’s point of view in retrospection with his memories depicting the idyllic life and subsequent misfortunes he experiences with his family, the novel catches the soul of the eighteenth century readers and the following ones with its sentimental and moralistic elements taking them back to the sphere of human nature. Despite the contradicting ideas on the work that it is thought “to be both a success and a failure, satiric and sentimental, coherent and disunified” all at the same time (Merritt 3), carrying not only the reminiscence of the writer’s personal life but also projecting the mid-eighteenth century England with references to different aspects of life, the novel receives popularity “for its gentle irony, and for its wisdom as well as its sense of absurdity” (Jeffares 6). This paper will focus on The Vicar of Wakefield through its thematic and stylistic qualities, representative aspects of the eighteenth century England, namely literary, social and political elements clearly observed within narration and Goldsmith’s distinct satirical style, which pave the way for the novel through centuries up to the modern readers as an amalgam of different influences and traditions.

scholarly journals Conjunctive Adverbials Used by Charlotte Brontë in the Novel “Jane Eyre”

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Eva Leláková ◽  
Nikola Šavelová
Keyword(s):  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Self ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Linguistic Study ◽  
Semantic Categories ◽  
Semantic Coherence ◽  
The Way

Conjunctive adverbials or simply conjuncts represent specific sentence elements contributing to the overall semantic coherence of a text. Their use or omission depends entirely on the decision of the author of the text, the way he or she perceives and intends to convey a particular type of connection between its individual parts. In the present linguistic study of the literary work—the self-selected novel “Jane Eyre”—we observe and subsequently specify and evaluate occurrence of conjunctive adverbials in the text with the focus on their particular semantic categories and positions within a sentence.

Netta Syrett, Nobody’s Fault, and Female Decadence: The Story of a Wagnerite

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-199
Author(s):  
Crescent Rainwater
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Female Audience ◽  
The Way

Abstract Scholars have traditionally associated decadence with misogyny, and therefore it has typically been perceived as antithetical to feminism. Nobody’s Fault (1896), Netta Syrett’s first novel, complicates this perception through the way in which the self-assertive protagonist, Bridget Ruan, finds in the decadent music of Richard Wagner a liberating form of aesthetic experience. In this essay, I argue that encountering Wagner’s music marks Bridget’s immersion into a form of decadent culture that affirms her aesthetic longings and awakens her erotic desires. At the same time, the novel condemns an antifeminist form of decadence that is associated with elitist male artists who indulge in a superficial manipulation of language and treat women as art objects. The novel’s resistance to exclusionary forms of aesthetic experience is modelled in its straightforward narrative style and strategic engagement with familiar New Woman themes. This middlebrow narrative thus made Syrett’s intervention into debates about women and decadence accessible to a middle-class female audience. When we recognize that the history of decadence includes its appeal to feminist writers such as Syrett rather than an exclusively antifeminist legacy, we can begin to uncover a more nuanced history of feminism and decadence in England at the fin de siècle.

“Was There Not Reason to Doubt?”:Wielandand Its Secular Age

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 735-756
Author(s):  
Christine Hedlin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Hearing Voices ◽  
Medical Discourses ◽  
American Cultural History ◽  
Secular Age ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines Charles Brockden Brown'sWieland, or The Transformation(1798) as engaging with the distinctive “secular age” of the early republic, a volatile moment in American cultural history when such experiences as having visions and hearing voices, both prevalent in the novel, drew an array of religious and medical explanations. Drawing upon the work of theorists of new secular studies, I argue that the doubts of the novel's narrator Clara regarding who or what is responsible for her family's undoing signal the difficulty of storytelling in an age of spiritual and intellectual uncertainty. By thus reading Clara's indeterminacy as a reaction to the contrapuntal religious and medical discourses of the early republic, my essay offers new insight into the significance of her rhetorically strained, inconclusive attempt at rendering a didactic narrative. Rather than offering Clara merely as a negative example for readers – a victim of her own imperfect discipline, as she herself assesses – Brown utilizes her self-proclaimed failure to ironize the self-assuredness of eighteenth-century didactic novels in an age rife with doubt.

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