Laurence Sterne's Letters and Sermons: Glossing the Themes of Tristram Shandy

Abstract

Abstract:Here, I shall analyze not only Sterne's letters but his sermons deliberative and judicial discourse to his parishioner-friends. In doing so, Sterne created in such texts a gloss of Tristram Shandy and its thematic center: the diseases of pride and malice as well as the cures for these ills found in laughter and friendship (1:19,32;4:401). Even while my analysis will echo the claims of other scholars that these categories of texts parallel the thematic center of his Sterne's fiction, I shall stress that Sterne created what amounts to a thematic gloss from a stance outside his novel. Unlike his fictionwriting contemporaries, whose used letters to drive plot within their novels, Sterne's letter-and-sermon gloss to Tristram Shandy underscores his abiding intent to challenge traditional boundaries between autobiography and fiction.