Laurence Sterne, Fame and Fashionable Disease

Lawlor, Clark (2017) Laurence Sterne, Fame and Fashionable Disease. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 40 (4). pp. 519-535. ISSN 1754-0194

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Abstract

This article argues that the ‘fashionable’ diseases of consumption and melancholy were both linked by eighteenth-century medical theory about nervous diseases and sensibility, and that these diseases ‘worked’ for the novelist Laurence Sterne to promote his fiction and fame as a man of sensibility and sentiment. Through his own life and those of his literary and artistic characters Sterne exploited the long literary and medical tradition of melancholy and consumption as diseases of genius, but also used the newer rationales of the mid-eighteenth century to link the two conditions in a contemporary way.

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