『センチメンタル・ジャーニー』における聖なる踊りと人間的絆の探求
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概要
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Strange !-that almost all readers have agreed that the chapters of 'The Supper' and 'The Grace' of A Sentimental Journey can be seen to be sublime and transcendent. Modern readers of the Journey can run the whole gamut of the commentaries from despise to justification; they are suspicious and not entirely willing to comply with Yorick, the narrator and protagonist. As the century ascended, his sentimental ideas and attitudes were charged; the nineteenth century was the hostile age to his Journey. His eighteenth-century contemporaries hailed it and made a vast imitative literature. There have been polyphonic voices of his readers, but they have pleasingly joined in unison in regard to the affirmative evaluation of the 'feast of love' (ASJ, 158) and peasants' dance episode. This article is largely concerned with 'The Supper', 'The Grace' and the final con-cluding chapter: 'The Case of Delicacy'. I shall read A Sentimental Journey in the context of its own time, because the reading of these two chapters has been unvarying since the time Sterne wrote it and shall accordingly hold to the view that 'the sanctioning of erotic encounter as sentimental innocence was generally acceptable to readers of the text in the eighteenth-century, despite contemporary concerns with the propriety of narra-tives'. In this attempt, I shall take up the arguments that a set piece of supper and dance of a peasant family is not idiosyncratically good or pious but the coda of Yorick's religious feeling and philanthropy which echo throughout his narrative; in the ostensibly ribald concluding chapter, his audience are put to the test whether they take his hand stretching out in the dark, or not.