Parody, Paratext, Palimpsest. A Study of Intertextual Strategies in the Writings of Laurence Sterne

The volume focuses on the extraordinary generative power that conversation unfolds in Sterne’s authorial ventures, structuring all the heterogeneous and fragmentary materials of the Shandean bricoleurs (to use Genette’s term) around the pivotal act of exchanging place, mode, pace; of interpellating authors, texts, intertexts; of translating actions into words and words into actions. The work is, accordingly, divided into four chapters each of which maps out a network of issues which have most urgently solicited, in my perception, a critical, responsive interaction with Sterne’s écriture: 1) the problematisation of Sterne’s own ‘beginnings’ with writing and his parodic inauguration of his conversation with the reader; 2) his eccentric investiture as author in the battle of books and letters within the fluid scenario of mid eighteenth-century literature; 3) his apprenticeship in a ludic, liminal practice of plagiarism/intertextuality and his creation of a multi-generic palimpsest of fragments; 4) his ironic experimentation with printhood and bookhood and his original interrogation of the threshold of the arts. The problematisation of Sterne’s narrative beginnings is thus coterminous with his fascination with thresholds and bordercrossing of one sort or another, so that one conversationalistic or interactive frame is imbricated upon the other and text, context, paratext or metatext overlap with one another, incessantly redrawing their permeable borders.