A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy

Title page from Vol. I of the first edition
Author	Laurence Sterne
Language	English
Genre	sentimental novel, travel literature
Publisher	T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt
Publication date	1768
Publication place	Great Britain
Media type	Print, 12mo
Pages	283, in two volumes
OCLC	972051212
Dewey Decimal	823.6

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) is a novel by Laurence Sterne. It follows the Reverend Mr. Yorick on a picaresque journey through France, narrated from a sentimental point of view. Yorick is a character from Sterne's bestselling previous novel Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) who also serves as Sterne's alter ego. The novel was planned as a four-volume work, but Sterne died in 1768 with only the first two volumes published; Yorick never makes it to Italy.

The book follows the genre conventions of a travel narrative, with a playful and fragmented writing style. A key theme is the interconnected nature of sympathy and sexual desire, which both inspire strong pro-social feelings. Analysis of the book often seeks to answer whether its depictions of extreme emotion are meant to be serious, or whether Yorick is an unreliable narrator intended to mock the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility.

At its first publication, A Sentimental Journey was widely praised for being more emotionally moving and less bawdy than Tristram Shandy. In the first decades after his death, A Sentimental Journey was Sterne's most popular work. Victorian readers disapproved more strongly of its sexual content, and its reputation declined. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a rehabilitation of Sterne generated more interest in the novel, though it is often now overshadowed by Tristram Shandy.