Swiftly Sterneward

Essays on Laurence Sterne and His Times in Honor of Melvyn New

Contributions by Joseph G. Kronick, Taylor Corse, James E. May, Martha F. Bowden, Eric Rothstein, Frank Palmeri, Elizabeth Kraft, W G. Day, Madeleine Descargues-Grant, Donald R. Wehrs Edited by W. B. Gerard, E Derek Taylor, Robert G. Walker

Not available to order

Publication date:

07 April 2011

Length of book:

312 pages

Publisher

University of Delaware Press

ISBN-13: 9781611490596

These thirteen essays have been collected to honor Melvyn New, professor emeritus (Florida), and are prefaced by a description of his scholarly career of more than forty years. Suggesting the wide range of that career, the first eight essays offer various critical perspectives on a diverse group of eighteenth-century authors. These include a reading of Eliot in the shadow of Pope; a comparison of Gainsborough’s final paintings and Sterne’s Sentimental Journey; a study of Johnson and casuistry; a discussion of Smollett’s view of slavery in Roderick Random; a bibliographical study of a Lyttelton poem; a comparison of Swift and Nietzsche; and two essays about Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. Laurence Sterne, the primary focus of Professor New’s scholarship, is also the focus of the final five essays, which treat Sterne in contexts as disparate as the kabbalah, abolitionist discourse, local English church politics, the use of the fragment, and, finally, the culture of modernity.
This volume lives up to the spirit of its dedicatee. There is no English equivalent for the German word Festschrift, and it is very much in the German tradition that such a collection is brought together by the honoured academic's close colleagues, often including his former doctoral students. It is typically published on the occasion of the dedicatee's retirement, but in this case it is hoped as well as expected that there will still be many years in which Sterneans will read articles, editions and reviews from the pen of the American Nestor of Stern studies.