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ROBERT FOLKENFLIK is a professor of English at the University of California at Irvine. His books include Samuel Johnson, Biographer; The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation; and The English Hero: 1660–1800. He lives in Laguna Beach, California.

NOTES

1. Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. Lewis Perry Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 416.

2. Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Michael, seigneur de Montaigne, trans. Charles Cotton (London, 1700), 1:358.

3. A. Alvarez, “Introduction to A Sentimental Journey,” in A Sentimental Journey, ed. Graham Petrie (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 8; Jean-Jacques Mayoux, “Variations on the Time-Sense in Tristram Shandy,” in The Winged Skull: Papers from the Laurence Sterne Bicentenary Conference, ed. Arthur H. Cash and John M. Stedmond (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1971), 16.

4. See Hugh Kenner, The Stoic Comedians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), ch. 3, “Samuel Beckett: The Comedian of the Impasse,” 67–107.

5. The relation of Sterne to Garrick’s acting is considered in Ronald Hafter, “Garrick and Tristram Shandy,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 7 (1967), 475–89; Ian Donaldson, “The Clockwork Novel: Three Notes on an Eighteenth-Century Analogy,” Review of English Studies n.s. 21 (1970), 14–22; and Alexis Tadié, Sterne’s Whimsical Theatres of Language: Orality, Gesture, Literacy (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003).

6. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, vol. 6, ed. Melvyn New and W. G. Day (Gainesville: University Press of Florida), 6:37–38. All further references will be to this volume and pages in the text.

7. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1704), ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 208.

8. Samuel Johnson, The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 314–15.

9. For two good accounts of sexuality in Tristram Shandy, which differ from mine, see Frank Brady, “Tristram Shandy: Sexuality, Morality, Sensibility,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 4 (1970), 41–56; and Robert Alter, “Tristram Shandy and the Game of Love,” American Scholar 37 (1968), 316–23. I would dissent from some of Alter’s views on imaginative “fulfillment.”

10. William Bowman Piper, Laurence Sterne (New York: Twayne, 1965), 62.

11. Frank Kermode, “Endings, Continued,” in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 82.

12. Kermode, 90.

13. An Historical and Classical Dictionary (1776), ii, s.v. “Sterne,” in Sterne: The Critical Heritage, ed. Alan B. Howes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 236.

14. Wayne C. Booth, “Did Sterne Complete Tristram Shandy?” Modern Philology 48 (1951), 175. Less convincingly, Douglas Brooks calls attention to the fact that the number nine stands for circularity in numerological terms in order to argue that the book was intended to be complete. See Number and Pattern in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 178 n.

15. Booth, 175.

16. Booth, 181.

17. In The Winged Skull, 147–48. I am not considering at length, for reasons that will become apparent, the common notion that Sterne died before he could bring the work to completion, and that the work is therefore unintentionally incomplete.

18. Quoted by Allentuck, 150.

19. Thomas Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

20. Northrop Frye, “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility,” ELH 23 (1956), 144–52.

21. A Tale of a Tub, 210.

22. Mayoux, 16.

23. For a religious reading of the term, see Elizabeth W. Harries, “Sterne’s Novels: Gathering Up the Fragments,” ELH 49 (1982): 35–49.

24. Richard A. Lanham, “Tristram Shandy”: The Games of Pleasure (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 47. Although I disagree with Lanham’s thesis,