A Sentimental Journey is a satirical novel as well as an influential example of travel-writing in English. This is an account of Sterne’s own travels in France, thinly disguised—via a layer of satire and literary flair—as the travels of a fictional “Yorick.” As a work of comedy, it owes much to the seminal comic novels that came before—particularly Don Quixote, to which Sterne makes frequent reference in his own work—as well as earlier examples of travel writing.
Sterne is at pains to distinguish his efforts from other prominent examples of travel writing, particularly those of Tobias Smollet. Sterne finds Smollett's negative attitude to travel and the experiences it entails at best distasteful and at worst despicable—and he says as much in A Sentimental Journey by incorporating Smollett, in caricature, as the character "Smelfungus," who travels with "the spleen and jaundice," who finds the world "discoloured or distorted," and who writes of his travels as an "account of his miserable feelings."
Yorick's account, by contrast, is that of "The Sentimental Traveller": those who have "travell’d [...] as much out of Necessity, and the besoin de Voyager, as any one in the class": those who travel because of an irrepressible urge—a need—for new experiences, learning opportunities, and adventures.
