Through A Bakhtinian Lens: A Study On Carnivalized Characteristics Of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey

Laurence Sterne is a unique writer in the 18th Century English literature. His second book, A Sentimental Journey, is as important as the first one Trsitram Shandy. Due to the sentimental episodes described in A Sentimental Journey, this book has been praised as a milestone of sentimental novels. And domestic researches mainly focus on the sentimentalism reflected in the text as well. In the novel, special attentions are paid to fools, non-linear plots, digression and body. Those features can be found the same expression to Carnival theory as a perspective of interpreting the text. This paper initiates to analyze the carnivalized characteristics of the text by applying Bakhtin's theory on fools, crowning and decrowning, serio-comic and grotesque body. Thus, the specialty of Sterne will be explored and his carnival spirit revealed.