Sterne Laurence - Shandean Humour in English and German Literature and Philosophy

SHANDEAN HUMOUR IN
ENGLISH AND GERMAN LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY

LEGENDA, founded in 1995 by the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on Arabic, Catalan, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. An Editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative Literature Association.

The Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose primarily through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research.

Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences. Founded in 1836, it has published many of the greatest thinkers and scholars of the last hundred years, including adorno, einstein, Russell, Popper, Wittgenstein, Jung, Bohm, Hayek, Mcluhan, Marcuse and Sartre. Today Routledge is one of the world's leading academic publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It publishes thousands of books and journals each year, serving scholars, instructors, and professional communities worldwide.

www.routledge.com

Chairman
Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London

Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French)

Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish)

Professor Anne Fuchs, University of St Andrews (German)

Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish)

Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (English)

Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret, Queen Mary University of London (French)

Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian)

Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian)

Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics)

Professor Peter Matthews, St Johns College, Cambridge (Linguistics)

Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese)

Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (English)

Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queens College, Oxford (German)

Professor David Shepherd, Keele University (Russian)

Professor Michael Sheringham, All Souls College, Oxford (French)

Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish)

Professor David Treece, Kings College London (Portuguese)

Managing Editor
Dr Graham Nelson
41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2JF, UK

www.legendabooks.com

EDITED BY KLAUS VIEWEG, JAMES VIGUS AND KATHLEEN M. WHEELER

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
2013

First published 2013

Published by the
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

LEGENDA is an imprint of the
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2013

ISBN 978-1-907975-31-8(hbk)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

The humour of Laurence Sternes novel Tristram Shandy (17591767) has frequently been discussed as though it were a peculiarly English phenomenon. Yet admiration, imitation and critical discussion of Shandean humour were central characteristics not only of anglophone sentimental fiction and periodical writing of the later eighteenth century, but also of the European-wide Sterne mania. The present collection examines Shandean humour in Sternes own work and in subsequent English and German texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with one excursion into an early twentieth-century French work.

This volume has its origin in discussions between the three editors regarding the curious, often underestimated, yet long-term appeal of Shandean humour to German philosophers and literary theorists. The initial result was a small conference held at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, in September 2010. This conference proved a fruitful forum for exchange between scholars of Anglo-American and German literature and philosophy, and the majority of the essays in this book began life as papers delivered on this occasion.

The editors are most grateful for the provision of conference funding from the Faculty of English, Cambridge; as well as from the Institute for Philosophy, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena; and from the Friedrich Nietzsche Kolleg of the Klassik-Stiftung, Weimar, directed by Rdiger Schmidt-Grply. James Vigus gratefully acknowledges the further funding received from LMUexcellent, which has supported his postdoctoral research fellowship at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich (20092012).

For discussions and suggestions that have enriched the book, we thank all those who attended the conference in 2010, and especially Christoph Bode, Philip Jenkins, Julian Roberts and Claus-Artur Scheier; a special word of thanks to Cecilia Muratori.

Thanks are due to Kathleen Singles for translating , both from the German.

John Woram kindly provided the images of the maps printed in , published in an earlier form on his website: .

With regard to the production of the book, many thanks to Graham Nelson for his advice and patience in equal measure; to Alexandra Lloyd for her copy-editing; and to Sue Dugen for compiling the index.

Throughout this volume, non-English quotations are given both in the original language and in translation: such translations are by the author of the respective chapter unless otherwise stated.

A note on texts of Tristram Shandy . The wealth of informative annotation in the three-volume Florida edition of the novel makes this the standard point of scholarly reference: Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman . Vols. I and II: The Text , ed. by Melvyn New and Joan New (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978), Vol. III: The Notes , ed. by Melvyn New with Richard A. Davies and W. G. Day (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984). However, this is not necessarily the edition most likely to be standing on a shelf at home or in an office, and since many readers have their own favourite edition, each contributor to this volume has taken quotations from whichever one he or she prefers. References are always made to volume and part number, so that the quotations can be easily located using any edition.