I read A Sentimental Journey in an excellent 2003 Oxford World’s Classics edition, which presents the work with other, related writings by Sterne. Yorick / Sterne is exquisitely and intrinsically unreliable: a wonderfully slippery fictional construct. Travel literature traditionally relies on the reliability of the narrator as witness. This complicated and ambiguous first-person / third-person narrator plays a huge role in the success of the narrative. He narrates the tale of his travels in the person of “Mr Yorick”-on the one hand, a transparent alter ego (Sterne had published his own sermons as The Sermons of Mr Yorick), yet, on the other, a reference back to the parson character in his breakthrough work, Tristram Shandy (1759-67). The book was Sterne’s last, published less than a month before his death from tuberculosis in 1768, and it draws on a journey he himself made through France and Italy in 1762, in search for a climate that would benefit his health. It’s salutary, as always, to remember quite how postmodern premodern literature can be. I hadn’t read any Sterne for years, but revisiting A Sentimental Journey reminded me of how hilarious he is, and how sophisticated and experimental.
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