Thank you so much, dear Deidre. Your kind words made my whole week. I hope the class went well nonetheless!

I greatly enjoyed the conversation with Jacke. Thank you for having me!

academic.oup.com/book/62527?l...

Until May 22 the introduction to my book on Sterne and his Soviet readers is available open-access on Oxford Academic!

Lives and Adventures 2 Irish Men and the Eighteenth-Century Novel DECLAN KAVANAGH If novels by and about women in the eighteenth century initiate a new literary form for the exploration of interiority, the opposite case might be made for many of the novels by and about Irish men. The long-held belief that the eighteenth century inaugurated a new language of interiority or subjectivity associated with the joint rise of empiricism and the novel has been challenged by scholars such as Jonathan Kramnick who argue that for many writers in the period, the 'ostensible privacy or interiority of mental states is often not at issue' in their writing.' More particularly, the precarity of the novel-reading (and -writing) classes in Ireland, and their awareness of living in a culture in which definitions of a 'gentleman' were dangerously unfixed, seemingly produce literary forms that are constantly veering towards the unstable and anti-mimetic territory of satire, allegory, and the picaresque. One of the best known such works by an Irish writer (if not actually set in Ireland) is Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67); unique as it might appear, it sits in a context of other works by Irish writers of the period.* Novels by Anglo-Irish men in the eighteenth century, more often than not, disrupted the very project of bourgeois masculinity that the new literary form of the English novel promulgated as the century progressed." Any survey of Irish men and the novel in eighteenth-century Ireland must thus begin by qualifying what is meant by Irish' and what is meant by 'the novel'. The designations of 'Irish' or "Anglo-Irish' have a contested history both in the historical context of eighteenth-century Ireland and in its ancillary scholarly field of Irish eighteenth-century studies. As James Ward articulates in his essay Irish and Anglo-Irish Writing' (2024):

Proofs! Forthcoming chapter in *The Cambridge History of the Irish Novel* amongst stellar company & excellently steered by Prof Chris Morash. I’ll be doing these with some Easter chocolate to power me through #IrishLiterature #Novels #speirgorm #GulliversTravels

Today: QMCECS Seminar 31 March
Rebecca Tierney-Hynes (Edinburgh) 'Richard Steele and the Corps of Comedy'
More info: tinyurl.com/2uy8668m
31 March 2026
Time: 17:15. UK Time.
Location: QMUL Mile End Campus ArtsOne, Room 1.36 (entrance from the rear of the building).

Friends in London and in the area! If you are free on the 15th of April, please come to my book launch!

Akira Kurosawa on writing

Here is my best Habermas story.

I am grad student waiting in LONG line for Habermas talk. There is a tall man waiting in front of me. Line moves so we are eventually visible to organizers, a woman looks over & makes horrified face. Runs out: "Prof Habermas! You don't have to wait in line!"

@lsternetrust.bsky.social !

Graffito on a page in a copy of Tristram Shandy: a line drawing in profile of Slawkenbergius, recognizable because of his large nose.

Niche but cool. I mentioned in class that there was little evidence that #18thc readers had ever responded to the invitation tendered by the blank page in Tristram Shandy & drawn the Widow Wadman. & then a student revealed the portrait of Slawkenbergius she found inscribed into her copy of our novel

Very true!! WalterGPT

Three books stacked on top of one another with a sepia toned image of a man giving a shot to a young child sitting on his mother’s lap with a family standing around the mother and child

Book post is the best kind of post.

Post from Julia Fine that says, "Write the book you want to read because you will have to read it 75 times."

#writerslife

If you're trying to finish a book (& it's not easy now!), best not read Tristram Shandy w/ all its examples of how not to do it.
But I do rather like the example of the Archbishop who dawdles b/c convinced that his first thoughts, indeed any good thoughts, might be "the temptations of the evil one."

Soon in New Haven.

Congratulations, Vitto! Beautiful cover and image. What a great present to Montaigne and all of us, readers!

Happy birthday to Montaigne, and to my book! This product of love and errance, now available @academic.oup.com.

Reading Sterne in Stalin's Russia This talk discusses the 1920s and 1930s as a critical juncture in the Russian reception of Laurence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey.

daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/events/readi...

Friends in Cambridge, MA/Boston and nearby. I’m giving a lecture about my upcoming book at Harvard’s Davis Center + a conversation with Daria Khitrova!

Discussion Group: Laurence Sterne and Early Soviet Translators: Drafts, Notes, and Digressions

occt.web.ox.ac.uk/event/discus...

Dear friends in Oxford, I would be very happy to see you at my talk on Laurence Sterne and his translators on Monday, if you are around. @oxfordcct.bsky.social

My favourite!

A Wikipedia entry. Below a photograph of a Victorian woman, “Jane G. Austin American writer Not to be confused with Jane Austen.”

On this anniversary, spare a thought for anyone who publishes research on Jane Austin, and can’t go a day without explaining to someone, “No, it really is the one with the -i- in it.”

A marbled page

Without much reading, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motley emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions, and truths.

(Happy birthday to Laurence Sterne.)

Endless journey cards by @tomgauld. Green version available here: laurencesternetrust.org.uk/shandy-hall-... A great postable #Christmaspresent for all ages. These 12 picture cards can be arranged to form 479,001,600 different landscapes! Inspired by the works of Laurence Sterne.

Can’t wait to read it!

𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗽𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲𝘀
𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗟𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝗘𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝗲𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗵 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗿𝘆, 𝟭𝟲𝟲𝟬–𝟭𝟴𝟯𝟬
Edited by Brecht de Groote, Lieve Jooken, Sonja Lavaert & Guy Rooryck

More info: bit.ly/4ntQjaJ

#Translation #Literature #C18 #History

An artistic impression of part of a world map, a figure, film reels, other spherical objects, and a heart

1/9 Our latest print issue, a special issue on "Wandering Ideas: Circulations of Radical Social Thought in the Long Nineteenth Century" guest edited by @pkuligowski.bsky.social from papers presented at the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2022. The introduction: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Networks of Reception in the Eighteenth-Century British Press and Laurence Sterne Cambridge Core - English Literature: General Interest - Networks of Reception in the Eighteenth-Century British Press and Laurence Sterne

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Great to see Mary Newbould's new book on #Sterne and networks of reception out and open access rom @universitypress.cambridge.org! Lots of rich #18thcentury material here, including oral recitals & naughty Sternean poetry
@shandyhall.bsky.social @lsternetrust.bsky.social