Laurence Sterne Novels for Education.

An experiment of a radical and seminal kind is Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67), which, drawing on a tradition of learned wit from Erasmus and Rabelais to Burton and Swift, provides a brilliant comic critique of the progress of the English novel to date. The focus of attention is shifted from the fortunes of the hero himself to the nature of his family, environment, and heredity, and dealings within that family offer repeated images of human unrelatedness and disconnection. Tristram, the narrator, is isolated in his own privacy and doubts how much, if anything, he can know certainly even about himself. Sterne is explicit about the influence of Lockean psychology on his writing, and the book, fascinated with the fictive energies of the imagination, is filled with characters reinventing or mythologizing the conditions of their own lives. It also draws zestful stimulus from a concern with the limitations of language, both verbal and visual, and teases an intricate drama out of Tristram's imagining of, and playing to, the reader's likely responses. Sterne's Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) similarly defies conventional sexpectations of what a travel book might be. An apparently random collection of scattered experiences, it mingles affecting vignettes with episodes in a heartier, comic mode, but coherence of imagination is secured by the delicate insistence with which Sterne ponders how the impulses of sentimental feeling are psychologically interdependent.

‎Eliza Haywood (1693-1756)

‎Haywood wrote and published over seventy works during her lifetime including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals. Haywood is a significant figure of the 18th

‎century as one of the important founders of the novel in English as a novelist. Pioneering English Today she is studied primarily novelist Eliza Haywood was also a successful playwright and Journalist. Though little is known about her early life, and her works were usually published anonymously, Haywood was an important figure in the history of British women's literature. Her earliest works were immensely popular predecessors of the modern romance novel, but she also wrote satirical novels whose themes foreshadowed a later generation of English literary lionesses, among them Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. "Haywood's gifts as a storyteller held the attention of her audience," declared Jerry C. Beasley in a profile in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "and some of her books were among the most successful and controversial (if not the most admired) works to be published during the first half of the eighteenth century."

‎One of Haywood's more enduring works was The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, published in 1751. Beasley called it "Haywood's longest, most carefully crafted and most enduringly popular work of fiction.... Its cleverly conceived protagonist is effectively portrayed as a type of the good-hearted but naive and careless girl, and the story centers on her often ridiculous and embarrassing experiences as she makes her entrance into society." In 1753 Haywood's next novel, Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, was published. This was her second attempt at a novel with a dual narrative (the first had been The Fortunate Foundlings in 1744), and these novels, along with the aforementioned Betsy Thoughtless, foreshadowed the works of a later generation of English women writers. Both Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte wrote novels focusing on the domestic world to which most women of that generation were restricted. The mid-twentieth century revival of interest in Austen's novels, along with interest in the British women writers who preceded her, led to a rediscovery of Haywood's works, which were largely forgotten after her death.