A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (Annotated)

First published in 1768, “A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy” is a comic novel by Laurence Sterne. In 1765, Sterne travelled through France and Italy as far south as Naples, and after returning determined to describe his travels from a sentimental point of view.

“A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy,” a combination of autobiography, fiction, and travel writing, chronicles the journey through France of a charming and sensitive young man named Yorick and his servant La Fleur.

The novel was extremely popular and influential and helped establish travel writing as the dominant genre of the second half of the 18th century. It defies conventional expectations of what a travel book might be. Unlike prior travel accounts which stressed classical learning and objective non-personal points of view, “A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy” emphasized the subjective discussions of personal taste and sentiments, of manners and morals over classical learning. An apparently random collection of scattered experiences, it mingles affecting vignettes with episodes in a heartier, comic mode, but coherence of imagination is secured by the delicate insistence with which Sterne ponders how the impulses of sentimental and erotic feeling are psychologically interdependent.