Recommendations
Books Like A Sentimental Journey
Best books to read after A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne
Readers who love A Sentimental Journey — Sterne's formally inventive travel narrative in which Yorick catalogues his emotional reactions instead of the monuments and history that conventional travel writing described — will enjoy these works of sentimental fiction, eighteenth-century travel writing, and the great tradition of the novel of feeling.
- 1Buy
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
by Laurence Sterne
Sterne's masterpiece — the source of the Yorick character and the most formally experimental novel of the eighteenth century; A Sentimental Journey is shorter and more focused, but Tristram Shandy shows the full range of Sterne's genius.
- 2Buy
Candide
by Voltaire
The companion satirical fiction from the same year — Voltaire (who admired A Sentimental Journey) deploys a similar intelligence in the opposite direction: Candide satirizes optimism by showing the world's cruelty, where Sterne's Yorick finds sentiment everywhere; the two together define the philosophical range of 1760s fiction.
- 3Buy
The Man of Feeling
by Henry Mackenzie
The Scottish sentimental novel that most directly imitates A Sentimental Journey — Harley's excessive sensibility to every human and animal suffering makes him the model of sentimental man; reading alongside Sterne shows how the mode was taken up and simplified.
- 4Buy
Paul et Virginie
by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
The French sentimental novel that most directly inherits Sterne's tradition — Bernardin's tale of innocent love on a tropical island was the most popular French novel of the eighteenth century and takes its emotional method from A Sentimental Journey.
- 5Buy
The Sorrows of Young Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The greatest work of the German Sentimental tradition — Goethe's epistolary novel of doomed Romantic feeling (1774) is the Continent's most influential response to the tradition Sterne helped create; A Sentimental Journey and Werther together define European literary sentimentalism.
- 6Buy
Jacques the Fatalist
by Denis Diderot
Diderot's formally experimental novel is the French novel most directly inspired by Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey — Diderot absorbed Sterne's digressive method and ironic self-consciousness and transplanted them into French philosophical fiction.
- 7Buy
Italian Hours
by Henry James
The American heir to the tradition of sentimental-aesthetic travel writing — James's essays on Italy record the same interior aesthetic reactions to landscape and art that Sterne's Yorick records in France; the two travel books together define the tradition of travel as self-examination.
- 8Buy
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
The twentieth-century American heir to the tradition of the journey as interior catalogue — Kerouac's sentimental method (the road as a vehicle for registering feeling and encounter rather than describing place) is the Beat generation's reinvention of what Sterne was doing in 1768.
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