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The Columbia History of the British NovelSterne understood, virtually at the beginning of its history, that the novel's destiny lay not with the kind of work being done around him, but with at least three hallmarks of the modern novel: difficulty, self-consciousness, and the attempt to render in all its subtlety the manifold subjectivity of the inner life. Setting aside the question of whether Sterne's contemporaries or his predecessors were really uninterested in these possibilities for the novel, it is undeniably true that his own work manifests all these qualities: he is difficult, he does promote self-consciousness, and he is sensitive to the peculiarities of interior experience. The difficulty of Tristram Shandy is undeniable. It is hard to read a book whose story line, such as it is, is hopelessly fragmented and delayed. These frustrations, moreover, have as one of their consequences a kind of alienation effect: as readers, we become self-conscious of our complicity in what Richardson rather peevishly called readers' desire for "Story, story, story"; such -163- a desire for an apparently seamless and progressive unfolding of linked events can falsify our experience of ourselves and the world ...» |
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