ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a reading of A Sentimental Journey which seeks to recapture its contemporary resonances. Eighteenth-century responses to A Sentimental Journey clarify some of the issues merely insinuated in Laurence Sterne's work, and show how the sentimental mode in travel writing offered new possibilities for the construction of individual and national identities. A Sentimental Journey charts the rehabilitation of instinct or feeling over reason in the English/British character, effectively reappropriating virtuous impulses from the French. The liberal political agenda of A Sentimental Journey is winsomely complicated by a sequence of encounters and reflections which address the issue of national character and its relation to liberty by paradoxical means. The premature ending of A Sentimental Journey, and of its author's life, was just the beginning of a tide of imitations which lasted into the early nineteenth century. The majority of Sternean imitations were of the Sentimental Journey rather than of Tristram Shandy.
