The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [0]
Biographical note copyright © 1995 by Random House, Inc. Introduction, chronology, selected readings, note on the text, notes, glossary, and appendix copyright © 2004 by Robert Folkenflik
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eISBN: 978-0-307-43238-4
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v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
INTRODUCTION by Robert Folkenflik
CHRONOLOGY
SELECTED READINGS
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF
TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENTLEMAN
VOLUME I
VOLUME II
VOLUME III
VOLUME IV
VOLUME V
VOLUME VI
VOLUME VII
VOLUME VIII
VOLUME IX
NOTES
GLOSSARY OF MILITARY TERMS
APPENDIX: THE SORBONNE MEMOIR
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INTRODUCTION
Robert Folkenflik
In the twentieth century Laurence Sterne was hailed as the most profound and the most modern of any eighteenth-century novelist writing in English. He had been highly influential from the eighteenth century onward, and the fictions of such important European writers as Denis Diderot, E.T.A. Hoffman, and Jean Paul Richter in his own century display the effects of Tristram Shandy. Major modernists such as Thomas Mann, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, along with writers closer to and of our own time including Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino, Carlos Fuentes, and Salman Rushdie, among many others, attest in their works and sometimes in explicit statements to the continued importance of Tristram Shandy for the novel.
To speak of Tristram Shandy and the novel is paradoxical. Sterne himself does not use the word novel in any of his known writings, and until recently it was nearly impossible to prove that he had read English novelists of his own day (see VI, xxxviii, n. 1). In characterizing Tristram Shandy, Sterne often calls attention to its satire. He saw himself in a line of clerical satirists stretching from Rabelais to Swift and including Erasmus and Robert Burton. His choice to call an earlier fiction a “political romance” and a comment written the month he died that he envied the author of the Roman Comique and was writing a “Romance … which … is most comic”1 suggest that he would have been more at home thinking of his work as “comic romance,” a form with affinities to the novels of Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett and synonymous for some in the eighteenth century with the novel. In this same passage Sterne also identifies with Cervantes, the single most important influence on the eighteenth-century English novel. The judgment of early readers of Tristram Shandy was typically divided, some considering it a novel and others a satire.
Sterne, who today seems modern and even postmodern, was indebted to the writers of the previous centuries. He learned a good deal about Tristram’s first-person narrative voice from the Prologues of Rabelais and Cervantes, from the autobiographical essays of Montaigne, from Robert Burton’s “Democritus Junior to the Reader” in The Anatomy of Melancholy, and, closer to his own time, from the narrator of Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub. All these writers, along with Erasmus and Shakespeare and others, figured in his work in a number of ways other than by simply providing material that he wove into his text (in all probability from commonplace books that he, like other preachers of his day, kept to provide topics for his sermons). And his style, like those of Montaigne, Bacon, Burton, and others, could be characterized as anti-Ciceronian, the style of the mind in process, rather than one that gives us the results of its thinking, as we find in Edward Gibbon, a characteristic writer of Sterne’s time. Sterne’s was an old wine newly bottled