SOURCE: "Locating Experience in the Body: The Man of Feeling," in her Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 98-115.

In the following excerpt, Van Sant discusses A Sentimental Journey to support her argument that Sterne uses emotional sensibility as well as physical sensitivity as satirical devices to focus the readers' attentions—and intellects—upon themselves.

The Abbe de Condillac's statue touches first itself and then the world and thus discovers the existence of each.' It is an epistemological rather than a psychological statue, and Condillac's real interest in his examination of touch lies in the recurring eighteenth-century epistemological problem of how to verify knowledge of what is outside the self. Self-discovery is a step toward discovery of the external. But Condillac's centralizing of touch in an epistemological context has a psychological parallel in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey. Yorick...