New begins by focusing on Sterne's texts and their sources, discussing the purposes of his famous borrowings from past writings, his Anglicanism, and his reliance on John Norris of Bemerton. This section concludes with an argument for the removal from Sterne's canon of ?The Unknown World.? New then offers several readings based on placing diverse texts in proximity: Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son alongside the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and Samuel Johnson's ?London? against T. S. Eliot's ?The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.? The final section offers several proximate readings of Sterne alongside his contemporaries, Jonathan Swift, Richardson, and Boswell, and modernist authors and texts?Proust, Bruno Schulz, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
As he brings these varied authors together, New suggests that literary greatness inheres in the uncertainties and mysteries?in the words of Keats?of works proven capable of attracting thoughtful attention over varying times and wide spaces. He encourages the continued teaching of these challenging texts in the future of literary studies.
Autorentext
Melvyn New, professor emeritus of English at the University of Florida, is the general editor of the nine-volume Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne. He is coeditor of the four-volume Sir Charles Grandison in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson.