Under-regarded roots: the Irish references in Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" (Pre-published version)

Abstract

Laurence Sterne has always occupied an uncertain place within the Irish literary canon. Important commentators have consistently denied that his work is, in any significant way, Irish. Referring to the fact that the Tipperary-born Sterne was the son of an English soldier stationed in Ireland, Arthur Clery famously stated that “To call Sterne an Irishman is the mere pedantry of birth administration”. W.B. Yeats contended that Sterne’s Tristram Shandy should not be included in a canon of “national Irish literature” because it fails to reflect the nation’s “Celtic” traditions and character. Seminal surveys of Irish literature, including Declan Kiberd’s Irish Classics (2000), Norman Vance’s Irish Literature: A Social History (1999), and Joep Leerssen’s Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael (1986), do not mention Sterne at all, even in passing, and, although Derek Hand writes incisively about Sterne in his study, A History of the Irish Novel (2011), he makes the unnecessarily extreme (and untrue) caveat that Sterne placed “no emphasis on his Irish roots whatsoever”.