United States or Dominica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The first mention of Sterne in the Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen is in the number for November 15, 1764. In the report from London is a review of the fifth edition of Yorick’s Sermons, published by Dodsley in two volumes, 1764. To judge by the tenor of his brief appreciation, the reviewer does not anticipate any knowledge of Sterne whatsoever or of Shandy among the readers of the periodical. He states that the sermons had aroused much interest in England because of their authorshipby Lorenz Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, a

Goethe’s criticism of the second volume, already alluded to, is found in the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen in the issue of March 3, 1772. The nature of the review is familiar: Goethe calls the book a thistle which he has found on Yorick’s grave. “Alles,” he says, “hat es dem guten Yorick geraubt, Speer, Helm und Lanze, nur Schade! inwendig steckt der Herr Präceptor S. zu Magdeburg .

[Footnote 1: This is well illustrated by the words prefaced to the revived and retitled Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen, which state the purpose of the periodical: “Besonders wird man für den Liebhaber der englischen Litteratur dahin sorgen, dass ihm kein einziger Artikel, der seiner Aufmerksamkeit würdig ist, entgehe, und die Preise der englischen Bücher wo möglich allzeit bemerken.” (Frankfurter gel. Anz., 1772, No.

Yet the book has been remembered more persistently than any other work of its genre, except Jacobi’s works, undoubtedly in part because it was superior to many of its kind, partly, also, because its author won later and maintained a position of some eminence, as a writer and a pedagogue; but largely because Goethe’s well-known review of it in the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen has been cited as a remarkably acute contribution to the discriminating criticism of the genuine and the affected in the eighteenth-century literature of feeling, and has drawn attention from the very fact of its source to the object of its criticism.

The first notice of Sterne’s death is probably that in the Adress-Comptoir-Nachrichten of Hamburg in the issue of April 6, 1768, not three weeks after the event itself. The brief announcement is a comparison with Cervantes. The Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen chronicles the death of Yorick, August 29, 1768.