TY - JOUR
AU - Meier, Thomas K.
AB -  on demonstrable biographical connections, and political allegiances. Keymer goes much further than previous critics in attempting to understand Sterne's attitude to national politics in the 1760s. He convincingly argues that the way in which Uncle Toby's amours dominate the later volumes of Tristram Shandy can be understood in the light of a prevailing national mood of melancholy. This mood is partly attributable to the reverberations of the defeat of the Jacobite cause at Culloden, and national divisions over the Seven Years War. When he treats the Ossian craze and a revival of interest in Marvell within Whig circles as paralleling Sterne in their expression of a national ambivalence about war he is also convincing. But the prominence they are given implies that they are being identified as major sources for Tristram Shandy. This undue prominence perhaps betrays the fact that these chapters originated in conference papers. A final chapter could have strengthened the parallel or clinched the link by drawing broader conclusions about Sterne, or about the 1760s, or novelistic intertextuality. Keymer resists conclusions; indeed, the ends of his chapters tend to anticipate the next rather than rounding things up. This open-endedness is a manifestation of Keymer's stimulating 
TI - British Discovery Literature and the Rise of Global Commerce
JO - Essays in Criticism
DO - 10.1093/eic/54.1.82
DA - 2004-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/british-discovery-literature-and-the-rise-of-global-commerce-koz3vS4AxG
SP - 82
EP - 87
VL - 54
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -