This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1954.

Ultimately, irony appears to be a term with no definitive meaning, the product of a critical enterprise that over time identified particular literary devices and perspectives a irony."--BOOK JACKET.

The eighteenth century was a period when the modern Novel emerged through the work of writers such as Laurence Sterne (1713-68), Richardson, Defoe, Fielding and Johnson. However, the writing of Sterne is recognised as influencing modern writing from Joyce and Woolf onwards more than any of the other eighteenth century novelists.In the last twenty years Sterne's work has become a focus for a flourishing body of work and significant debates in many new and developing areas of literary theory which include gender, sexuality, postmodernism, and deconstruction. Sterne's major novel 'Tristram Shandy' is regarded as deploying a range of 'post-modern literary devices' expected to be found in late twentieth century work rather than in work written in the 1700s. This volume combines the most interesting and stimulating recent critical thinking about Sterne and represents recent theoretical and critical debates surrounding Sterne's writing.

Experiencing ethics not only refers to being confronted with a situation in which one must choose a course of action; it also makes reference to giving a narrative account of the circumstances and chain of events leading to such crossroads. Between both there is a chasm, a space of indeterminacy into which R. Musil and L. Sterne delve with aesthetic means. Their poetics move in opposite directions, but by following them to their last critical consequences this study reveals a kindred ethical stance. This interpretation sheds light on the ethics revolving around character construction by examining the constraints thwarting any attempt to complete a biographical account or convey a protagonist that led his or her life. Neither Musil nor Sterne posit a narrative agenda that could reach a last chapter or lead to a groundwork determining their ethics. A closer look into their tight-knit prose reveals that both rely on the narrating, on a skill that must be incessantly cultivated through a digressive or essayistic style. Equipped with a vast theoretical repertoire, this approach makes a strong case for a new constellation in comparative literature.

Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness explores the novel’s participation in eighteenth-century “inquiries after happiness,” an ancient ethical project that acquired new urgency with the rise of subjective models of wellbeing in early modern and Enlightenment Europe. Combining archival research on treatises on happiness with illuminating readings of Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin and Mary Hays, Brian Michael Norton’s innovative study asks us to see the novel itself as a key instrument of Enlightenment ethics. His centralargument is that the novel form provided a uniquely valuable tool for thinking about the nature and challenges of modern happiness: whereas treatises sought to theorize the conditions that made happiness possible in general, eighteenth-century fiction excelled at interrogating the problem on the level of the particular, in the details of a single individual’s psychology and unique circumstances. Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness demonstrates further that through their fine-tuned attention to subjectivity and social context these writers called into question some cherished and time-honored assumptions about the good life: happiness is in one’s power; virtue is the exclusive path to happiness; only vice can make us miserable. This elegant and richly interdisciplinary book offers a new understanding of the cultural work the eighteenth-century novel performed as well as an original interpretation of the Enlightenment’s ethical legacy.