Sterne, Laurence

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Laurence Sterne, detail of an oil painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1760; in the National Portrait …—National Portrait Gallery, London

(born Nov. 24, 1713, Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ire.—died March 18, 1768, London, Eng.) English novelist and humorist. Sterne was a clergyman in York for many years before his talents became apparent when he wrote a Swiftian satire in support of his dean in a church squabble. Turning his parishes over to a curate, he began to write Tristram Shandy (1759–67), an experimental novel issued in nine parts in which the story is subordinate to its narrator's free associations and digressions. It is considered one of the most important ancestors of psychological and stream of consciousness fiction. Long afflicted with tuberculosis, Sterne fled the damp air of England and undertook the travels that inspired his unfinished Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), a comic novel that defies conventional expectations of a travel book.

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