Dr Mary Newbould, Faculty of English

mcn23@cam.ac.uk

 

 

Biographical Information

I took my BA, MPhil and PhD at Cambridge before going on to work as a Director of Studies and a Supervisor in English at various Cambridge colleges for many years. My research and teaching expertise mainly lies in literature and visual culture of the long eighteenth century. I also hold the Qualification as a Maître de conférences qualified to teach at universities in France.

Between 2019 and 2021 I was appointed as a Senior Research Associate at the Faculty of English in my capacity as investigator with Helen Williams (PI) on Laurence Sterne and Sterneana, an AHRC-funded collaborative Digital Humanities project between Cambridge and Northumbria universities, Cambridge University Library, and the Laurence Sterne Trust. I am currently Co-Investigator on 'The Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts', an interdisciplinary project supported by the Polish government-funded National Science Centre, and sees a collaboration between Kazimierz Wielki University (Bydgoszcz) and Poznań University. 

From September 2022 I shall begin a Polonez Biz MSCA Fellowship as Principal Investigator on a new research project, Networks of Reception in Eighteenth-Century Newspapers and Magazines: Laurence Sterne. Based at Uniwersytet Kazimierza Wielkiego (Bydgoszcz, Poland) and working in close collaboration with institutional host Professor Jakub Lipski, the main output of this project will be a short monograph currently under contract with Cambridge University Press.

This project is co-funded by the European Commission and the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND grant. Our bid for this competitive research grant was ranked first in its category.

Research Interests

I specialise in how adaptation allows creative material to shift between genres, art-forms and languages within the contexts of its appearance. A major focus of my work on eighteenth-century 'afterlives' is Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), whose reception in Britain and beyond can be gauged by exploring Sterneana: the numerous and varied adaptations his writing has inspired from 1760 onwards in text, image, and performance. Laurence Sterne and Sterneana is an Open Access digital resource that makes first editions of Sterne's works and key examples of these adaptations freely available to all, illuminated by introductions by internationally renowned scholars. 

I continue to publish and present papers on Sterne's critical and creative legacies, and I take an active role in the international Sternean scholarly community. I'm an editor of The Shandean, a long-running journal dedicated to this author’s life, work, and times. I have spoken about Sterne on BBC Radio 4's 'In Our Time' hosted by Melvyn Bragg, and on BBC Radio 3's 'Free Thinking'. 

My work on the eighteenth-century British novel and the arts speaks to my longstanding interest in the intersection between literature and visual culture throughout this period. As part of the NCN-funded project that explores this field I am currently co-editing a multi-authored collection of essays to be published by Edinburgh University Press. I've also co-curated 'Illlustrated Smollett', an online exhibition celebrating Tobias Smollett's work and the visual culture it inspired to mark the tercentenary of his birth in 2021. 

I am currently working on two monographs. One of these investigates the presence of Sterne and Sterneana eighteenth-century newspapers and magazines; the other explores the role that sculpture and statuary play in novels of this period, within the broader discourse of the Sister Arts. I regularly contribute reviews to The Scriblerian, and I am a participant of the international DIGITENS project (The Digital Encyclopedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century). 

Websites:

My personal project page: www.marynewbould.com 

Sterne Digital Library project page: https://sternedigitallibrary.wordpress.com/

Selected Publications

Books:

Digital Edition:

Edited Collections:

  • The Edinburgh Companion to the Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts, ed. with Jakub Lipski (Edinburgh University Press, 2023; under contract)
  • Adaptation and Digitization in the Long Eighteenth Century: Sterneana and Beyond, ed. with Helen Williams, special feature of 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Enquiries in the Early Modern Era (Rutgers, forthcoming 2022)
  • Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey: "A Legacy to the World", ed. with W.B. Gerard (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2021)

Chapters in books:

  • ‘“The statue cannot be formed, unless our inclination concur thereto”: Statuary and Sculpture in the Imaginary of the Eighteenth-Century Novel’, in The Edinburgh Companion to the Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts, ed. Jakub Lipski and M-C. Newbould (EUP, forthcoming 2024)
  • ‘Laurence Sterne and Eighteenth-Century Visual Culture’, in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Art, ed. Michelle Wang, Neil Murphy, and Cheryl Julia Lee (Routledge, forthcoming 2023)
  • ‘“Whose pictur’d Morals charm the Mind / And through the Eye correct the Heart”: Re-writing the pictorial narrative of A Harlot’s Progress’, in Neo-Georgian Fiction: Reimagining the Eighteenth Century in the Contemporary Historical Novel, ed. Jakub Lipski and Joanna Maciulewicz (London: Routledge, 2021), pp. 61-79
  • ‘“Contact Incarnate” and “Touching Fiction” in Laurence Sterne and Sterneana’, in Defining and Redefining Space in the English-Speaking World: Contacts, Frictions, Clashes, ed. Fanny Moghaddassi, Ghislain Potriquet and Anne Bandry-Scubbi (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2016), pp. 167-82
  • ‘Wit and Humour for the Heart of Sensibility: The Beauties of Fielding and Sterne’, in The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, ed. Daniel Cook and Nicholas Seager (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 133-52
  • ‘A “new order of beings and things”: Caricature in Sterne’s Fictional Worlds’, in Hilarion’s Asse: Laurence Sterne and Humour, ed. Anne Bandry-Scubbi and Peter de Voogd (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), pp. 37-52

Articles:

  • ‘Solitary confinement and sociability in Sterne', in Sociability and the Discourses of Nature in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture, ed. Tymon Adamczewski, Jakub Lipski, and Karl Wood, special issue of Literature & History (forthcoming 2023)
  • With Jakub Lipski, ‘“Every sentence, and every action, diverts by its peculiarity”: Diverting genre in frontispieces to Tobias Smollett’s fiction’, English Studies, Special issue: Eighteenth-Century Frontispieces (forthcoming 2022)
  • ‘“[B]y the knowledge of the great saint Paraleipomenon—”: Si(g)ns of Omission in Laurence Sterne', 'Omission' special issue of Symbolism, 22 (forthcoming 2022)
  • ‘“[It] were wisdome it selfe, to read all Authors, as Anonymo’s”: Anonymity, Virtual Communities, and Sterneana’, Adaptation and Digitization in the Long Eighteenth Century: Sterneana and Beyond, ed. M-C. Newbould and Helen Williams, special feature of 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Enquiries in the Early Modern Era (Rutgers, forthcoming 2022)
  • Introduction to Leonard MacNally, Tristram Shandy: A Sentimental, Shandean Bagatelle, In Two Acts (London: S. Bladon, 1783), ed. with Peter de Voogd, reprinted in The Shandean, 30 (2019), 89-111
  • ‘Gothic piles and cynical follies revisited: A quizzical tour through country house literature of the long eighteenth century’, Nordic Journal of English Studies, 17.1 (2018), 85-119
  • With Melvyn New, ‘Reconsidering a Sternean Attribution: Cambridge University Library’s “Sterne Volume”’, The Library, Vol. 18, Issue 4 (December 2017), 478-86
  • ‘The Rape of the Whisker and Fuzwhiskiana: Re-grooming Pope’s Rape of the Lock in early nineteenth-century Cambridge’, Philological Quarterly, 95.1 (2016), 125-48
  • With Helen Williams and Siv Gøril Brandtzæg, ‘Advertising Sterne’s Novels in Eighteenth-Century Newspapers’, The Shandean, 27 (2016), 27-57
  • ‘“Illustrating” A Sentimental Journey: The “first annotated edition” of 1803?’, Sterne Tercentenary Conference Proceedings,The Shandean, 24 (2013), 103-24
  • ‘“The utmost fluidity exists with the utmost permanence”: Virginia Woolf’s un-Victorian Sterne’, Woolf Studies Annual, 16 (2010), 71-94
  • ‘Fly-on-the-wall: Toby’s Fly and Parasitic Parody’, The Shandean, 21 (2010), 103-24
  • ‘Character or Caricature? Richard Newton’s Illustrations of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey’, Word & Image, 25 (2009), 115-128
  • ‘Sex, death and the aposiopesis: Two early attempts to fill the gaps of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey’, Postgraduate English, 17 (2008), web
  • ‘Shandying it Away: Sterne’s Theatricality’, The Shandean, 18 (2007), 156-70
  • ‘“For the Good of the Nation”: “Unkle Toby and Corporal Trim”’, The Shandean, 17 (2006), 85-92

Reference Works:

  • 'Laurence Sterne', Oxford Bibliographies, ed. with Paul Goring (forthcoming 2023)
  • 'Laurence Sterne', Literature Criticism from 1400-1800 (Layman, 2020)
  • Multiple entries for The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820, ed. April London (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)