Author · 2 titles

Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne (1713–1768) wrote Tristram Shandy, a novel that refuses to begin, and A Sentimental Journey. An Irish-born Yorkshire clergyman, he turned print itself into a joke: marbled pages, black pages, dashes, and a narrator who cannot get born for hundreds of pages. The humour is learned and naughty at once; the feeling, when it arrives, is genuine. Sterne's consumption and celebrity tours made him a star of sensibility. Modernism starts earlier than it admits — and it starts here, laughing. Two titles, and they still teach the English novel how to misbehave.

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