Bloomsbury Academic Biblical Sterne: Rhetoric and Religion in the Shandyverse (New Directions in Religion and Literature)

Is Laurence Sterne one of the great Christian apologists? Ryan Stark recommends him as such, perhaps to the detriment of the parson’s roguish reputation. The book’s aim, however, is not to dispel roguishness but rather to discern the theological motives behind Sterne’s comic rhetoric, from Tristram Shandy and the sermons to A Sentimental Journey. To this end, Stark reveals a veritable avalanche of biblical themes and allusions to be found in Sterne, often and seemingly awkwardly in the middle of sex jokes, and yet the effect is not to produce irreverence. On the contrary, we find an irreverently reverent apologetic, Stark argues, and a priest who knows how to play gracefully with religious ideas. Through Sterne, in fact, we might rethink humour’s role in the service of religion. Review Biblical Sterne will change the way I think about all of Sterne’s works – something that can be said of too few works of scholarship. --Jack Lynch, The Shandean About the Author Ryan Stark is Associate Professor of Humanities at Corban University. He is the author of Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (2009) and co-editor―with Tina Skouen―of Rhetoric and the Early Royal Society (2015). He has also published numerous essays on Renaissance and Enlightenment thought.