Sympathy and Sentiment

Abstract

Large claims have been made for Sterne’s sentimentalism. R. F. Brissenden says that without it, Tristram Shandy would not be a real novel: ‘What transforms Tristram Shandy from an exercise in learned satire or dramatic rhetoric or obscure bawdry is primarily its sentimentalism.’¹ John Traugott even goes so far as to claim that sentimentalism is incorporated into Tristram Shandy for its value as a way out of the Shandys’ communicative impasse:

Solipsism and sentimentalism—these are the two faces of Sterne’s coin. This is the way he defines the fall—as solipsism, and the way he redeems the fallen—by sentimentalism.²

Sterne’s sentimentalism is his greatest glory.³