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Rating: 
Summary: Only clay-cold heads and luke-warm hearts can resist it
Review: A Sentimental Journey is a fabulous book for so many reasons. Laurence Sterne was an immensely influential writer in the 18th century--his major works, Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy, were responses to the travel narrative and newly born novel, respectively. His writing is essential to scholars of the 18th century--he is referenced in Austen's Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, Brown's The Power of Sympathy, Foster's The Coquette and Tyler's The Contrast. To understand and appreciate his novel is to have a better appreciation and love of the works that built their structures on his foundation. And yet it is original, as Yorick says himself, "both my travels and observations will be altogether of a different cast from any of my fore-runners."Yet it is not solely for historical benefit that one should read Sentimental Journey. The adventures and amours of Sterne's semi-autobiographical Yorick are delightful. One of the most romantic passages I've read in a book occurs when Yorick inadvertantly takes the hand of a woman and describes in detail the thrill of merely holding it. Granted, hers is not the only hand he will hold, but he writes so wonderfully, candidly and engagingly that it is extremely difficult to hold his passions against the sentimental Yorick. His scene with the starling locked in a cage is pertinent and a touching commentary on slavery. What a guy! My only complaint is the editor of this edition does not feel it necessary to translate the French-of which there is plenty-making some passages difficult to understand at best. However,this is a sentimental journey that I will gladly take over and over.
Rating: 
Summary: Not just for scholars
Review: Like Sterne's other works, _A Sentimental Journey_ is extraordinarily playful. His works are the eighteenth century's postmodernist works of play. They have lots of textual puzzles and tend toward the absurd. For example, the Mr. Yorick of the _Journey_ is also a character in Sterne's major novel _Tristram Shandy_ and is also the name under which he publishes his own sermons (he was a clergyman). The text is very "fragmentary" and the novel even jokes about that itself, labelling parts of itself "fragment." In these ways, the _Journey_ is fun and modern. But it is also indicative of an important eighteenth-century trend--sensibility or sentimentalism. All eras have their debates about the relationshp between the individual and society and this is one eighteenth-century answer. This opinion has nothing to do with "rights" but everything to do with "sympathy." Mr. Yorick, the "sentimental traveller," relates to other human beings through sympathetic physical responses, most notably the "pulses" and "beats" of his heart and hands for various women. Therefore, this book is a good way to get into a very different historical mindset while at the same time seeing the roots of some of the literary forms of today.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant. Absolutely hillarious satire
Review: Sterne befuddles and delights readers and critics alike in A Sentimental Journey. He takes the fashionable travel log of the time and satarizes it. Contemporary critics had a fit over its supposedly bawdy nature, yet some modern readers may over look its sublte innuendo. The form of the novel is quite unlike anything that had preceeded it, thus is important for any scholars. Most importanly, however, the book is funny and fun to read.
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