Postmodernism in the eighteenth century? Enlightenment intellectual contexts and the roots of 21st century concerns in Tristram Shandy

摘要

This essay argues the case for a reconciliation of two traditions of reading Tristram Shandy : interpretations of Sterne as a postmodernist avant la lettre do justice to his undeniable modernity but ahistorically wrest him from his eighteenth-century contexts, while purely historicizing interpretations which adequately read him in his historical contexts frequently neglect Sterne’s distinctly •modern” appeal. These two traditions, however, can be reconciled if what seems so postmodern about Tristram Shandy is traced to Sterne’s 18th-century intellectual contexts. By locating their origins in 18th-century debates and concerns, the essay explores four areas in which Sterne appears to anticipate 20th-and 21st-century concerns or literary techniques : (1) the critique of science and progress, (2) metafictional narrative techniques and strategies, which can be shown to grow out of a reflection on the limits of tolerance, (3) post-modern narrative games with time, and (4) the problematization of history and historiography.