Summary
This bawdy, high-spirited novel--whose author, Laurence Sterne, was described by Diderot as "the Rabelais of the English"--provoked a literary scandal when its first two volumes were published in 1759. A masterpiece of narrative absurdity, ribald humor, and philosophical playfulness, Tristram Shandy is famously studded with witty metafictional gambits--chapters out of order, blank and blacked-out pages, a preface that occurs in the middle of the book--that prefigured postmodernism by two centuries.
Tristram Shandy, the hero of this fictional autobiography, purports to narrate the story of his life, but along the way he engages in so many colorful digressions and exuberant jokes that his birth does not even occur until Volume III. In the meantime, we meet an unforgettable supporting cast of characters--including Shandy's father and mother, his uncle Toby, the servant Trim, Dr. Slop, and Parson Yorick--whose whimsical obsessions, domestic conflicts, and disastrous mishaps form the fabric of this genre-defying tour de force. With its lively exploration of both the logical limitations and the wildest possibilities of fiction, Tristram Shandy has earned its reputation as one of the greatest comic novels in English literature.
(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed).
If Fielding showed that the novel (like the traditional epic or drama) could make the chaos of life coherent in art, Sterne only a few years later in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760--67) laughed away the notion of order. In Sterne's world, people are sealed off in their own minds so that only in unpredictable moments of spontaneous feeling are they aware of another human being. Reviewers attacked the obscenity of Tristram's imagined autobiography as it was published (two volumes each in 1759, early 1761, late 1761, 1765, and one in 1767), particularly when the author revealed himself as a clergyman, but the presses teemed with imitations of this great literary hit of the 1760s.
Through the mind of the eccentric hero, Sterne subverted accepted ideas on conception, birth, childhood, education, and the contemplation of maturity and death, so that Tristram's concerns touched his contemporaries and are still important. Since Tristram Shandy is patently a great and lasting comic work that yet seems, as E. M. Forster said, "ruled by the Great God Muddle," much recent criticism has centered on the question of its unity or lack of it; and its manipulation of time and of mental processes has been considered particularly relevant to the problems of fiction in our day.
Sterne's Sentimental Journey (1768) has been immensely admired by some critics for its superb tonal balance of irony and sentiment. His Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1760) catches the spirit of its time by dramatically preaching benevolence and sympathy as superior to doctrine. Whether as Tristram or as Yorick, Sterne is probably the most memorably personal voice in eighteenth-century fiction.
(Bowker Author Biography)
