> > There was a theory (though I never tried this out on a
> > professional 18thC specialist) that Tristam Shandy was the first post
> modernist novel.
> >
>
> Well, I suppose it predates Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner
>
> P
Hogg plays the multiple-narrative trick in Memoirs&Confessions (as did Emily
Bronte in +Wuthering Heights+).
I don't think this is even metaphorically analogous to post-modernism. Hogg
gives us multiple and conflicting narratives (as does Hawthorne on occasion
and most obviously Durrell in +The Alexandria Quartet+) but he doesn't
challenge the narrative structure itself.
Pick your truth, but there is still a truth to be picked.
Hogg shuffles the cards, Sterne broke the deck.
Both good and rather radical games in their own way.
In some ways (eg in introducing himself as a character into his own fiction)
Hogg seems close to Borges and Marquez.
Generically, a version of magic realism before its time.
{But then, magic realism has always been a subtext of Scottish
fictions, poetry or prose.}
What Sterne is doing is different, and to my mind, considerably more
strange.
The Freemartin.
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