This article examines the figure of an undulating line, or “squiggle,” printed initially in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and copied by two nineteenth-century writers: first, by the German E. T. A. Hoffmann, in a little-known fragment, and, second, more famously, by the French Honore de Balzac as the epigraph to his novel La peau de chagrin. These three squiggles form a triangulated relationship of imitation across two centuries, three countries, and three languages. Through attention to William Hogarth’s line of beauty and Johann Caspar Lavater’s physiognomic contour lines, the article considers the history of the undulating line as a figure for reading. It suggests that, for Sterne, Hoffmann, and Balzac, the inclusion of a pictured line within text may be seen as a “reverse ekphrastic” maneuver, one that aims to reflect the movement of narrative in visual form. In this way, the “squiggle” is foregrounded as a new and concrete motif for comparative criticism on Hoffmann and Balzac, identifying a shared interest in Sterne, as well as in the relationship and entanglement of text and image.

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Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Tracing Squiggles: Laurence Sterne, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Honoré de Balzac

Diasporic Reasoning: The Idea of Africa and the Production of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America

Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel

Memories of the French Revolution cast a long shadow over British efforts to imagine a newly inclusive constitution in the course of the nineteenth century. Writers including William Godwin, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell perfected a distinctive sub-genre of the novel, which was profoundly attentive to the ethics of representation. The literary ‘labour’ of reform in the nineteenth century was imaginative, conceptual, and discursive, but it was not understood solely in metaphorical terms as a work without physical cost: instead, its impact was registered in the language of bodily exertion, privation, and daily acts of self-sacrifice. Novelists pondered the impact of their narrative experiments on the mood of the nation, whilst acutely aware of the ways in which their expanding readership could be mapped onto the ideal contours of the political franchise.

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Citations

Tracing Squiggles: Laurence Sterne, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Honoré de Balzac

Diasporic Reasoning: The Idea of Africa and the Production of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America

Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel

‘[A] common and not a divided interest’: Literature and the Labour of Representation

De Beckett van Hugo Claus: genese, zelfreceptie en 'wat hem aan rede restte'