Textual and Critical Intersections

Inthis collection of essays representing fifty years of scholarship on LaurenceSterne, Melvyn New brings Sterne into conversation with other authorsboth hiscontemporaries, such as James Boswell and Samuel Richardson, and modernists,such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce.Newbegins by focusing on Sternes 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 Sternes canon of The Unknown World. New then offers severalreadings based on placing diverse texts in proximity: Charles Dickenss Dombeyand Son alongside the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and Samuel Johnsons Londonagainst T. S. Eliots 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 andtextsProust, Bruno Schulz, Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway, and Joyces APortrait of the Artist as a Young Man.As he brings these varied authors together, Newsuggests that literary greatness inheres in the uncertainties and mysteriesinthe words of Keatsof works proven capable of attracting thoughtful attention overvarying times and wide spaces. He encourages the continued teaching of thesechallenging texts in the future of literary studies.