Comrades! It’s our 50th episode!! And what better way to celebrate than wrapping up our discussion of one of the raddest books of all time, Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67)? Fear not, we are *far* from exhausting the staggering number of dick jokes you find in these spry nine volumes. But we also talk about the politics and philosophy behind the sentimental novel, how Sterne simultaneously loved that genre and thought it was a prime target for satire, and how discourses of feeling and of the body intersect. In addition, we finally get to the amours of Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman and discover that reading a goddamn map is apparently an extremely horny thing to do. And, as a teaser to our upcoming Henry Fielding episode, we land a few sick burns on the sentimental novel’s OG himself, Samuel Richardson.
We read the Penguin edition, with an introduction by Christopher Ricks and edited by Melvyn New and Joan New. There’s a ton of great scholarship on the sentimental novel on both sides of the Atlantic, but John Mullan’s Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century remains a terrific account of the conceptual underpinnings of the genre and has a ton on Sterne’s place within it.
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