Laurence Sterne: Cock and Bull Stories

In December 1759 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman was published. In the space of a few hectic weeks the course of a man’s life and the course of literary history were changed.
This book is a reading of Laurence Sterne’s three works – A Political Romance, Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey – performed using the Sternean indulgent metaphor of the hobby-horse, i.e., every human activity seen as a petty but useful pastime that is fully aware of its own childishness. All hobby-horses suggested by Sterne, writing included, are here revisited in the light of historical, cultural and biographical contexts. Also, this book seeks to engage with Sterne’s past in its relation to our present.
Sterne lived on the threshold of what historians would later call modernity: though the bomb would blast a few decades later, the fuse had been lit in his time. At the cost of overburdening Sterne’s Cock and Bull Stories (as he would call them) with too much work, one can claim that reading Sterne’s books and books about his life means understanding how old our “modernity” is, or worse, how far we are from being “modern”, now that many of the cultural categories which were born in the pangs of that twist of history are dangerously being discarded. If this is so, Sterne once more might be, as his admirer Goethe once said, “a model in nothing and a guide and a stimulator in everything”.