ABSTRACT
Christopher Fanning, in turn, offered a contextualised discussion of Sterne’s textuality, in which his experiments with the mise-en-page – a quality that is often taken to illustrate the writer’s novelty – are seen as stemming from the Scriblerian tradition. A peripheral remark, a sketch of the background, a search for sources of inspiration – the introduction of Sterne and A Sentimental Journey tends to be more than convenient to corroborate the critical narrative. Thomas Curley’s “Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey and the tradition of travel literature” makes for an apt summary of this critical tendency. Just as conventionalised sentimentality has been identified with “Sternean fashions”, the figure of the sentimental traveller has been gradually deprived of the complexity with which Sterne endowed his Yorick. Sternizm, when used without due attention devoted to Sterne himself, becomes a vague synonym for sentimentalism or Romantic irony.
