Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination

Gerard, W. B.

doi:10.4324/9781315250748

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Gerard is explicit in his outright rejection of the possibility that the captive could be read not as a comment on slavery, but as a meditation on the imprisoned subject: 'Although some critics desire to identify the captive as an incarcerated criminal', he writes, 'Yorick clearly finds his "single captive" among "the millions of my fellow creatures born to no inheritance but slavery"'. 18 This is not quite true, however, and I would argue otherwise. The 'among' is Gerard's own and necessary intervention.…”

Section: Sterne's Captive and The Criticsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Sterne’s Captive and the Prison: Double Vision

POWELL

2022

The Shandean

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This essay contextualises Sterne’s captive from A Sentimental Journey in the debates about the form and function of the prison as a penal instrument, which raged in Parliament in 1778. In the same months, and the same city, the captive was returned to public attention through a Royal Academy exhibition in Piccadilly, which featured a much-commented upon painting, Sterne’s Captive, by Joseph Wright of Derby. This essay asks what light the contemporary prison debate can shed on Sterne’s text, and conversely, how painterly renderings of ‘The Captive’ in the 1770s, by Wright of Derby, and by John Hamilton Mortimer, can elaborate the disconcerting bifocalism of Sterne’s prison scene. These artistic stagings of the captive’s imprisoned state insist on the involvement of the viewer in the suffering on display, in distinctly Christian modalities which challenge a contemporary critical framing of this scene as a mechanics of sentimentalist avoidance. It returns to Sterne’s original a host of penological allusions which would have been evident to its earliest readers but which have become opaque, and offers close readings of three of the most innovative and influential paintings of A Sentimental Journey, and the relationship of compassion to inaction.

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Section: Sterne's Captive and The Criticsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Sterne’s Captive and the Prison: Double Vision

POWELL

2022

The Shandean

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Crazy Jane Hats and Maria Medallions: Consuming, Collecting and Containing Love’s Madness

Jamieson

2023

Wearable Objects and Curative Things

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Eighteenth-Century Illustrations of the Novels of Tobias Smollett

Fung¹

2014

Eighteenth-Century Life

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For most modern readers, Tobias Smollett’s novels are defined by violence and crude physical humor, both of which contribute to angry satire on society’s vices. By drawing attention to eighteenth-century illustrations in Smollett’s novels, I want to suggest that illustrators were engaged in their own interpretations of Smollett. Their images often criticize the texts they illustrate, and the readings they generate are alternative interpretive possibilities that the illustrators presumably deemed valid. While some of the passages chosen for illustration contribute to Smollett’s grumpy attack upon humankind, many other kinds of scenes, such as sentimental or gently humorous ones, were also illustrated. In this article, I propose that paying attention to what these illustrators thought important will open up new ways of approaching these texts.

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Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Sterne’s Captive and the Prison: Double Vision

Sterne’s Captive and the Prison: Double Vision

Crazy Jane Hats and Maria Medallions: Consuming, Collecting and Containing Love’s Madness

Eighteenth-Century Illustrations of the Novels of Tobias Smollett

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