Shandean identity in nineteenth-century French fiction

This research sets out to explore in greater depth the legacy of Laurence Sterne in early nineteenth-century French fiction. A Sentimental Journey is generally considered to have had a much wider impact on French culture than Tristram Shandy, because of its obvious direct associations, but to assume this, is to overlook the more subtle literary influence of Shandyism beyond surface Sternean appropriation. This research will investigate how Sterne, in his magnum opus Tristram Shandy, experiments with genre, form, style and materiality to express a breakdown of biological and biographical self and to demonstrate the inevitable futility of attempted reconciliation. This PhD will explore how this concept of unstable identity manifested in a Derridean division of signifier and signified, was adapted and explored by a generation of French writers, establishing a Gallic exploratory and experimentalist narrative of self which would act as a precursor to modernist streams of consciousness.