Laurence Sterne - A Life

Ian Campbell Ross

Oxford University Press

2001

498 páginas

16h 36m

ISBN-10: 0192804065

Laurence Sterne (1713-68) was in his mid-forties when the publication of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman catapulted him from obscurity to literary fame. His comic novel remains among the most innovative and influential fiction in world literature. Admired by Diderot, Goethe, Pushkin, Byron, and Dickens, it was the favourite novel of both Nietzsche and Marx. In the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Italo Calvino all acknowledged Sterne's influence on their own work, while Milan Kundera has acclaimed Sterne as a writer who taught the world to see novel as 'a great game'.

The extraordinary story of how a provincial clergyman became the most fashionable author of his day is the more remarkable for having been engineered by its self-publicizing subject. 'I wrote', Laurence Sterne declared, 'not to be fed, but to be famous', The bawdiness of his comic novel shocked many contemporaries, who denounced him as a scandal to the cloth. The author's admirers, by contrast, praised him extravagantly; it was Thomas Jefferson who considered Sterne's writings 'the best course of morality that ever was written'. Amidst the controversy, Sterne himself stood firm, revelling in the fame and wealth his age's obsession with novelty and fashion allowed him.

In this new biography, Ian Camppbell Ross makes full use of recent literary and historical scolarship in order to examine the life and career of Laurence Sterne and the cult of the celebrity author.