English philology faculty

The contrast of town and village life in Laurence Sterne’s novels

	Pages
INTRODUCTION	6
MAIN PART :
1. Life and literally career of Laurence Stene.	8
2. The contrast of town and village life in Laurence Sterne’s novels.	12
3. Author's contribution to English literature.	17
4. The main themes and characters in the novels of Laurence Sterne.	23
Conclusion	25
Reference	27

Introduction
Laurence Sterne's enduring reputation as an author rests upon two works, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760–1767) and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), both of which were written and published during the last nine years of his life. During that time he was the recipient of excessive praise and the target of scathing criticism, heralded as a second François Rabelais, Miguel de Cervantes, or Jonathan Swift, but also condemned as an immoral hypocrite. Controversy continues about the precise nature of Sterne's contribution to English literature, but few scholars would deny him a place among the most important of eighteenth-century writers. It is Sterne more than any other author of that century whose work has seemed, time and again, of special interest to modern fiction writers as they experiment with realism, psychology, and “metacommentary” as the organizing principles of narrative.
Penniless Youth Sterne was born in Clonmel, in County Tipperary, Ireland. His English father made a poor living as a soldier in the army; his mother, a woman of Irish and French ancestry, was of a lower class than her husband, who apparently married her to settle a debt
with her father. Sterne spent much of his childhood moving with his family from one army barracks to another throughout England and Ireland, and his recollections of the military surroundings in which he grew up formed the basis for the characters of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim in Tristram Shandy. In 1723, Sterne began attending a school in Halifax, Yorkshire, but when his father died penniless in 1731, he was forced to discontinue his education and live with relatives in Elvington, Yorkshire. Two years later his cousin arranged for him to enter Jesus College, Cambridge, as a sizar,
which allowed Sterne to defray his university expenses by working as a servant to other students. At Cambridge he met John Hall-Stevenson, a rich and reckless young man whose home—Skelton Castle, renamed “Crazy Castle”—has figured prominently in the Sterne legend as the site of boisterous drinking parties and of a library containing a notable collection of curiosa and erotic literature.The anonymous pamphlet A Funeral Discourse, Occasioned by the Much Lamented Death of Mr Yorick, published in 1761, was but one of the many spoofs and rejoinders which attached themselves to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy throughout the 1760s and 1770s. If we are to recover Sterne's ‘sentimentalism’, we should look at the reception and circulation of his writings, and if we do this we can follow the lead of the pamphleteer. Sterne's fiction is notoriously self-conscious about the modes of a novel's coherence — about the powers of a narrator to convince, to beguile, and to satisfy. It is attentive to its ‘sociality’. Sterne's characters are attached to the world by the metaphors and allusions on which they rely, and which protect them against death, discord, and disaster. They are not mad, first because they are attached to each other by sympathy, and second because they are innocents whose limited ways with words are displayed to a reader who has to be sophisticated to comprehend their transparent instincts.