Laurence Sterne in Germany
Sterne arrived in Germany late and then all at once. Hewett-Thayer follows that arrival from Johann Friedrich Zückert’s weak and inaccurate 1763 Tristram Shandy through Johann Joachim Christoph Bode’s 1768 A Sentimental Journey, the version for which Lessing coined the word empfindsam and touched off a fashion for sentimental travel. From there the study tracks what Lessing, Wieland, Herder and Goethe made of the Yorkshire parson, down to the vogue for Lorenzo snuffboxes carried as badges of feeling. Separate chapters gather the German imitators, Johann Georg Jacobi and Moritz August von Thümmel among them, and the critics who turned on the sentimental habit, usually aiming at the followers rather than at Sterne. Columbia University Press published it in 1905 as the first attempt to tell the whole story from the sources.
