When Mr. and Mrs. Shandy stroll out to watch Toby and Trim march in formation to the Widow Wadman's house, they use a familiar occurrence to gauge the day of the week. The sight of Mr. Yorick's congregation emerging from the parish church tells them it is a Sunday; Mrs. Shandy provides the more specific information that it is Sacrament Sunday, which tells Mr. Shandy that it is the first Sunday of the month. Modern readers may slip over this brief exchange, but it is the gateway to a series of inquiries whose answers the original readers of Tristram Shandy would have taken for granted. Drawing on modern historical research and eighteenth-century texts, Yorick's Congregation: The Church of England in the Time of Laurence Sterne answers these inquiries.

Although Samuel Johnson's famed ramblings never took him more than five hundred miles from his London home, he was an indefatigable planner of distant voyages. Sharing with his fellow Englishmen that passion for investigating the unknown which had ushered in a momentous geographical revolution, Johnson became the original armchair traveler. His writings proclaim a boundless curiosity about the globe and demonstrate a pervasive preoccupation with travel in every conceivable form. Travel represented more for him than geographical movement; it was a symbol of intellectual growth in his life, his morality, and his society. While Johnson's biographers have all emphasized his fascination with exploration and discovery, no comprehensive study of his complex relationship to the epoch-making geographical advances of his century has heretofore appeared. Thomas Curley's Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel offers new perspectives on this crucial and surprisingly little-known concern of the man and his age, when English literature brilliantly mirrored the widening frontiers of the British Empire. Drawing extensively on Johnson's entire canon, the works of his contemporaries, and a vast store of much neglected travel books, Curley places Johnson's love of travel and travel literature firmly in its literary and historical contexts. Johnson's career began with the translation of a travel book, yielded numerous articles and essays on the subject in his middle years, and culminated in the publication of his own splendid description of the Highlands in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Keenly interested in geography, Johnson studied well over two centuries of travel literature to validate his own philosophy of human nature and to promote improved literary standards in what was then the second most popular genre in England. His masterpiece, Rasselas, not only enshrined his recurring vision of man as perpetual explorer but also exemplified that fruitful interaction between travel books and belles-lettres so prevalent throughout Johnson's age. Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel sheds new light on Johnson's career ambitions, his talents in moral observation and literary creation, and his inquisitive age. Johnson emerges in Curley's study as a truly representative writer completely captivated by the romance of Georgian travel and illustrative of the cultural impact of an expanding world picture upon the minds and letter of eighteenth-century Englishmen.

Jonathan Swift's influence on the writings and politics of England and Ireland was reinforced by a combination of contradictory forces: an authoritarian attachment to tradition and rule, and a vivid responsiveness to the disorders of a modernity he resisted and yet helped to create. He was, perhaps even more than Pope, a dominant voice of his times. The rich variety of the literary culture to which he belonged shows the penetration of his ideas, personality and style. This is true of writers who were his friends and admirers (Pope), of adversaries (Mandeville, Johnson), of several who became great ironists in his shadow (Gibbon, Austen), and of some surprising examples of Swiftian afterlife (Chatterton). Claude Rawson, leading scholar of the works of Swift, brings together recent essays, as well as classic earlier work extensively revised, to offer fresh insights into an era when Swift's voice was a pervasive presence.

Exploring how readers received and responded to literary works in the long eighteenth century, M-C. Newbould focuses on the role played by Laurence Sterne’s fiction and its adaptations. Literary adaptation flourished throughout the eighteenth century, encouraging an interactive relationship between writers, readers, and artists when well-known works were transformed into new forms across a variety of media. Laurence Sterne offers a particularly dynamic subject: the immense interest provoked by The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy inspired an unrivalled number and range of adaptations from their initial publication onwards. In placing her examination of Sterneana within the context of its production, Newbould demonstrates how literary adaptation operates across generic and formal boundaries. She breaks new ground by bringing together several potentially disparate aspects of Sterneana belonging to areas of literary studies that include drama, music, travel writing, sentimental fiction and the visual. Her study is a vital resource for Sterne scholars and for readers generally interested in cultural productivity in this period.

An account of Swift's dealings with books and texts, showing how the business of print was transformed during his lifetime.

With their appearance during the 1760s, the five instalments of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman caused something like a booksellers’ hype. Small publishers and anonymous imitators seized on Sterne’s success by bringing out great numbers of spurious new volumes, critical or ironic pamphlets, and works that in style and title express a congeniality with Tristram Shandy. This study explores these eighteenth-century imitations as indicators of contemporary assumptions about Sterne’s intentions. Comparisons between the original, the first reactions, and a number of late eighteenth-century imitations, show that Tristram Shandy was initially read against the background of Augustan and Grub-street satire. The earliest imitators harked back to traditions of banter and folklore, bawdy and grotesque humour, pathetic stories and orthodox religiosity, reaffirming a pattern of moral and aesthetic values that was conservative for its time. Philosophical Sentimentalism appears to have been a late development. It is also argued that, partly because of their bad reputation, some of the authors of forgeries and parodies had a greater influence on the original than the reviewers to whom Sterne is often said to have listened. The imitators followed leads and themes in the first instalments, developing them according to their own conception of Sterne’s project and the reasons for his success. As a consequence, they unintentially put a pressure on Sterne to alter his course, and even to abandon some of the narrative lines and themes he had set out for himself. The literature section contains a chronological checklist of English eighteenth-century Sterneana.

The humour of Tristram Shandy has often been acknowledged, but it is not easy to find scholarly articles on Laurence Sterne which suggest that their authors laughed as they wrote. Nine authors have been invited to redress this in the year of the tercentenary of Sterne’s birth. This volume offers nine different facets of humour, a kaleidoscope which enables readers to recombine at will the genial, the bawdy, the sentimental, the ludicrous, the hobby-horsical, the philosophical, the irreverent, the incongruous and the facetious, sending the text spiralling out of the page.

Shortlisted for the 2021 BARS First Book Prize (British Association for Romantic Studies)​ The Printed Reader explores the transformative power of reading in the eighteenth century, and how this was expressed in the fascination with Don Quixote and in a proliferation of narratives about quixotic readers, readers who attempt to reproduce and embody their readings. Through intersecting readings of quixotic narratives, including work by Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, George Colman, Richard Graves, and Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Dale argues that literature was envisaged as imprinting—most crucially, in gendered terms—the reader’s mind, character, and body. The Printed Reader brings together key debates concerning quixotic narratives, print culture, sensibility, empiricism, book history, and the material text, connecting developments in print technology to gendered conceptualizations of quixotism. Tracing the meanings of quixotic readers’ bodies, The Printed Reader claims the social and political text that is the quixotic reader is structured by the experiential, affective, and sexual resonances of imprinting and impressions. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

When Yorick, the roving narrator of Sterne's innovative final novel, sets off for France on a whim, he produces no ordinary travelogue. Jolting along in his coach from Calais, through Paris, and on towards the Italian border, the amiable parson is blithely unconcerned by famous views or monuments, but he engages us with tales of his encounters with all manner of people, from counts and noblewomen to beggars and chambermaids. And as drama piles upon drama, anecdote, flirtation and digression, Yorick's destination takes second place to an exhilarating voyage of emotional and erotic exploration. Interweaving sharp wit with warm humour, irony with sentiment, A Sentimental Journey paints a captivating picture of an Englishman's adventures abroad.