Location: BSECS 2022, Online

This paper was my first attempt at reformulating something I cut from early plans for my book. That book, Criticism, Performance, and the Passions is all about the way people wrote about the performance of emotion in the eighteenth century. Specifically, I was interested in how writers paid a lot of attention to what they called the ‘transitions’ between passions. I showed how that interest encourages us to read plays and poems differently (as sequences of passion with greater or lesser cadences between them) and how such an approach ultimately gives way to early character criticism, which deemphasizes dramatic sequence.

I didn’t talk about novels. Hence this paper on The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a work that seems obsessed with transition, and, not only that, seems to echo the way people wrote about stage transition. The claim of this paper was that Laurence Sterne uses transition to create character, and that he does so at multiple levels of the narrative.

I began with a quick sample of how people wrote about stage transition, then track transition (and the stage) up through the narrative levels of Tristram Shandy, indicating how a sense of character is always a function of transition. I finished by connecting all this to some recent work on eighteenth-century expressions of celebrity self and character.