The essays gathered here represent the finest examples of some of the most influential currents in Sterne scholarship, reconstructing more precisely the popular and religious contexts of his writing, and situating that writing ever more creatively within an expanding empire and an unfolding modernity. Many of these essays are also marked by a particular approach to their subject. It has long been apparent to readers that Sterne’s work embraces seemingly contrary or even conflicting values: satire and sentiment, tradition and innovation, the bawdy and the pathetic, the earthly and the spiritual.

Eighteenth-Century Life

The title [Swiftly Sterneward] is well chosen; it alludes to New’s career-long tracing of Sterne’s satirical influences, but does so through a quotation from Finnegan’s Wake, thereby capturing a sense of New’s other major scholarly pursuit, literary Modernism and its legacy in the eighteenth century. The contributions are equally well chosen, featuring a wealth of methodologies reflecting major currents within New’s own criticism. . . .Perhaps equally importantly, the essays create a sense of the scholarly conversation inspired by and surrounding New’s work, especially when read collectively and concluding with Donald Wehrs’s lucid appreciation. Indeed, it is difficult not to draw comparisons between Sterne’s celebrants. . . .and the generations of Shandeans influenced by New, many of whom contribute essays here.

Eighteenth-Century Studies

This volume lives up to the spirit of its dedicatee. There is no English equivalent for the German word Festschrift, and it is very much in the German tradition that such a collection is brought together by the honoured academic's close colleagues, often including his former doctoral students. It is typically published on the occasion of the dedicatee's retirement, but in this case it is hoped as well as expected that there will still be many years in which Sterneans will read articles, editions and reviews from the pen of the American Nestor of Stern studies.

The Shandean

The volume Swiftly Sterneward, in honor of Melvyn New, is divided into two parts, the first devoted to various poets and novelist. In spite of its title, there is only one essay on Swift, a short thought-provoking account of 'Satire and the Psychology of Religion in Swift and Nietzsche,' by Frank Palmeri. The second part concentrates on Sterne, with a notable essay by Madeleine Descargues-Grant on ‘Sterne and the Miracle of the Fragment,’ and a concluding piece by Donald R. Wehrs with the eye-popping title 'The Centrality of Sterne in the Culture of Modernity, or Melvyn New and the Rewriting of the West.'

American Behavioral Scientist