Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy commonly figures in literary history as an anomaly, a “postmodern” novel unaccountably composed in the last half of the eighteenth century. In an act of historical and critical daring, Carol Watts has produced a dense, provocative, intricate argument demonstrating that Sterne's work in fact typifies its era. With constant reference to Tristram Shandy as well as to Sterne's other novel, A Sentimental Journey, and to his final work, The Journal to Eliza, she analyzes the British experience of empire during and especially after the Seven Years’ War, showing how Sterne articulates and clarifies important aspects of a wider cultural situation.

The evils of empire have become a cliché, all too readily deployed. Watts demands that her readers, instead of assuming such evil, grapple with empire's complexities. She calls attention to the cultural implications of conquest and dominion, to the anxieties unleashed by the hegemonic position, and to the complicated interchanges among dominant and subservient peoples. She avoids unanchored abstractions. Thus, she comments at the beginning about the meaning of “state,” often theorized “in highly reified terms.” “I want to think of it,” she explains, “more performatively as the political form of social life, one that despite such a tendency towards hypostatization is also registered and constituted in fluid and capillary practices of administration, in regimes of knowledge and activity, in modes of writing … and as a utopian and imaginary limit” (4). She continues, “As such, it was increasingly woven through the fabric of ordinary eighteenth-century British lives: not just in terms of individual encounters with the law, but in questions of conduct, welfare, livelihood, health, trade, the discipline and freedoms of time” (4–5). She does not, however, leave such statements as self-sufficient: she goes on to discuss in detail most of the terms she adduces—such matters as the relation between time and conduct, between regimes of knowledge and matters of livelihood.

This is to say that Watts brings fresh perspective to familiar issues. The result is a sometimes dizzying movement among topics. Successive chapters concern the sense of national and individual uncertainty created by the expansion of empire; the functions of “military masculinity” as an ideal—and of visions opposed to it; the sexual politics implicit in homologies between state and family; the importance of attitudes toward slavery; the nature and significance of “women's time”; and attitudes toward Brahmanism. Not only are these subjects often unexpected; the point of view brought to bear on them illuminates them in unexpected ways. Moreover, the recurrence to Sterne's work calls steady attention both to the novelist's freedom to make use of whatever turns up and to how cultural circumstance shapes him.

Watts's interest, however, is less literary than historical: Sterne provides a means to her end of clarifying the importance of a war that materially changed Britain's place in the world and that, as she claims, also changed the nature of subjectivity. The convolutions of her argument defy summary, but a close look at a single chapter may suggest the agility and energy with which she constructs that argument. The chapter called “Women's Time and Work-Discipline: Or, The Secret History of ‘Poor Maria’” begins with a look at Sterne's Maria and her afterlife. Maria appears first in Tristram Shandy, a pathetic figure of grief and madness, mourning a lost love. She recurs in A Sentimental Journey, in which Yorick makes a pilgrimage to see her. Her history has been modified, but she remains an object for sentimental contemplation. As Watts economically explains, she then became a subject for painters and for literary “continuations,” a “highly bankable visual image” (197). What makes her a figure of such cultural power?

To answer this question, Watts explores the place of the libertine woman in mid-eighteenth-century culture, and especially that of the “magdalen,” the repentant fallen woman, who raised for the period troubling questions about the management of population in relation to the state's interests. Uncontrollable and unpredictable, the imagined figure of the wandering woman threatened economic and social stability. Sentimental fiction might seem to stabilize her, but it also dramatized her emotional volatility—a subject that brings up the issue of time, which women were thought to squander, partly by virtue of their emotionality.

Time-discipline preoccupied moralists and economists alike. (It also concerned Walter Shandy, who believes in clockwork but suffers from an accident.) Sterne, however, dwells rather on the mysterious alternatives to chronological order, those embodied in “the opacity of everyday life” (221). Maria, who plays the evening hymn to the Virgin at many times through the day, seems to exemplify a lack of chronological discipline. She also exemplifies, however, the paradox of “women's time,” an idea used both to place women outside the time of social labor and to make “their activity symbolically central to the maintenance of the social” (227). Women thus served as guardians of morality, a significant function in the state.

Women's time covered other possibilities besides Maria's apparent randomness. Watts discusses Mary Collier's powerful poem, “The Woman's Labour,” which reveals the disciplinary enforcements on women and the invisibility of their taxing work. Here, too, we find female contributions of social importance, but with virtually no assigned value.

Finally, returning to Maria, Watts summarizes: she is using her discussion “to name the ideological ruse, whereby women are located outside the time and values of the social, while also being central” (232). Maria possesses imaginative autonomy, yet she is rendered as a being of sentimental dependence. Disjunctions and ironies persist in representations of the female, within and outside sentimental literature.

The scope of this chapter—Sterne to Mary Wollstonecraft, prostitutes to laborers, discussions of morality to treatments of time—as well as its often exciting disjunctions may stand as representative of Watts's procedures. Although her prose is sometimes clotted (and she uses far too many sentence fragments for my taste), her arguments are invariably compelling, and her ability to reveal unlikely connections compels readers to think anew about what they may have taken for granted.