SOURCE: "A Sentimental Journey and the Syntax of Things," in Augustan Worlds, edited by J. C. Hilson, M. M. B. Jones, and J. R. Watson, Leicester University Press, 1978, pp. 223-39.

In the following essay, Battestin contrasts the emotional and sexuasl connection between characters in A Sentimental Journey with the solipsism that renders the characters in Tristram Shandy essentially isolated and unconnected to others.

Recently I made a case for the fundamental—it might be said, revolutionary—modernity of Tristram Shandy (1759-67), in which Steme, repudiating the Augustan faith in symmetry and rational order, devised a form to mirror and to mitigate the disturbing subjectivist conception of reality he found implicit in Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding—a form that defines the world in terms of the processes of the mind while implying, in its appeal to the senses and the imagination, the means of communication and relationship.¹ Enforced...