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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

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Introduction by Peter Conrad ... Read more

Customer Reviews (34)

Pre-modernist postmodern
A line from the movie "adaptation" put it best: this was a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post to.

Simply put, Laurence Sterne threw out all the literary conventions of what a novel should be and how it should be arranged, a few hundred years before more recent writers like Calvino, Joyce and Danielewski did. The result is "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman," a gloriously rambling, richly entertaining sort-of-novel.

"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me." So begins Tristram, who starts his life story with his "begetting," and attempts to tell the story of his birth and life, as well as the descriptions of relatives -- his lovable uncle Toby, his eccentric dad, his patient mother (who's in labor for most of the book).

But as he tries to tell us about his life, Tristram keeps getting sidetracked by all the stories that surround him -- his uncle's romance with the Widow Wadman and the war in which he received a nasty wound in a sensitive spot, the French, the doctor who delivered him, letters in multiple languages, the parson, the personal history of the midwife, and what curses are appropriate for what occasions.

Most novels are pretty straightforward -- they have a beginning, a middle and an end. But "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" totally ignores that, by having a beginning that lasts for the whole book, dozens of "middles," and no real end (it just stops at a suitable spot). All of this is without a real structure.

And he took this postmodern, break-all-the-rules mentality all the way, by including odd little illustrations -- when speaking of the death of Parson Yorick, Sterne includes a black page. Random empty pages. Asterisks instead of important paragraphs. And a bunch of squiggly lines to demonstrate precisely how the narratives in previous chapters looked.

At first glance, Sterne's writing style was pretty typical of his period -- detailed, somewhat formal in tone, and very talky. It takes a little while for Tristram to start dipping out of of his narrative -- at one point, he starts interrupting himself in midsentence. By the middle of the book, he's completely lost control of his own story.

And he twisted it around with lots of bawdy humor (such as poor Uncle Toby's groin injury, which causes quite a few problems), and the continuous comic stumbles of all the characters. On the subject of his own name, Tristram describes his dad's reaction: "Melancholy dissyllable of sound! which to his ears was unison to Nincompoop, and every name vituperative under heaven.")

Life is too rich to be encapsulated in a single story -- that's the problem with "Tristram Shandy," whose story is a classic comic delight of premodernist-postmodern skill.

The LONG life and rants of one, Tristram Shandy
Many things could be said about The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, funny, unique, and off-topic being a few of them. Personally, I would call The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy to be a rant of the longest degree. To prove my point, the main character isn't even born before the end of the second volume. It takes the character one year to write about one day in his life, so even if you enjoyed the book you would never get to read an end.
To be fair, this is one of the first true novels ever written and is the very first stream of consciousness novel to ever be written. So with that in mind, it can go off once in a while on a rant because everyone does that in their own head once in awhile.
The characters are rather creative, ranging from a king to a slightly strange mother, but the side trips get very annoying when you are trying to reach the end of the book. Do you honestly want to know what each person did months before the main character was even born? Do we really need to know what color this was and what Mr. Toby Shandy did to cause misfortune to his unborn son the moment he was conceived?
Personally, this book was far too droning. I would much rather read something with more plot, and less stream of consciousness. I admit that maybe people would probably enjoy reading this book for its unique style, but I can not stand to read it. The tangents are too long and the overall style just isn't for me.
With all that in mind, I say that The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is a decent book with a good story to tell, and tell... and tell. So if you like older writings with a twisted sense of humor, pick this one up.

Tristram Shandy: There Is Logic In The Illogic
When Laurence Sterne, in 1760wrote the first volume of TRISTRAM SHANDY in what was to be a series of nine, no one had any idea what this new genre of literature was meant to be.The only models that Sterne had were Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, so the field was pretty much wide open in terms of any competitor's choice of content, style, or theme. Sterne noted from these two that their successes were based on their characters' being placed in wildly varying and potentially threatening situations. He took these twin concepts of changeable location and possible harm which he incorporated into the first volume of Tristram Shandy, and then proceeded to turn the incipient world of novel writing over on its very young head.What differentiated this book from those of Fielding and Richardson was Sterne's abandoning the tidy world of the classical insistence on the need for unity.In a style that centuries later would be adopted by Joyce and Proust, Sterne twisted the relation between plot and time into a pretzel.To begin with, the title itself is a misnomer. The titular hero, Tristram, is not even born until midway through the book. He is born, appears briefly, disappears for lengthy periods of time, and then reappears briefly at the end. A more honest title would have been "The Life and Times of the Father and Uncle of Tristram Shandy."It is Walter Shandy, Tristram's father and Toby Shandy, the uncle, who dominate most of the action.And it is not simply a misdirection of who the primary protagonist is to be that gives TRISTRAM SHANDY its off beat flavor. What distinguishes this book from both its predecessors and most of its descendants is Sterne's refusal to use structured time as the unifying glue.

When Sterne presents his action in a manner that seems to defy the laws of causality in that results may precede causes, he does so by his novel use of the association of ideas which act to reconnect threads of thought that are snipped here and spliced there. Such cycles of snipping and splicing lead to digressions such as when in Volume II, the removal of Walter Shandy's wig leads his brother to be reminded of military tactics from his participation in a long past war. Such digressions take on a life of their own, like baby universes after the Big Bang with each one branching off to a possibly related clone. Sterne asks a lot of his readers to tolerate these rapid and often extended shifts in time and perspective.For those readers who are nimble enough of mind to follow, they are treated to some very comic scenes of humor that range from the broadest of satire to the most scatological of coarse jesting. By the time that Tristram makes his initial appearance, the reader has already learned to anticipate the many detours (some would call them roadblocks) of time and space that Sterne has inserted. Many of these scenes of digressive humor are so bizarre and pathetic, that the reader is not sure whether he should laugh or cry.And that perhaps is the magic that causes each new generation of readers to return and follow the twisted paths of time and space that even now can wring tears and laughs from them, sometimes in the same breath.

A forerunner to metareality and postmodernism
Lawrence Sterne's sprawling "Shandy" is a fun, difficult read I enjoyed most when I took the time to digest it in 50-60 page chunks. Sterne's meandering style, with no sense of plot, and digression upon digression, can be frustrating to those looking for a story or any sense of a straight narrative.

But for those who love word play, or, like me, grew up reading Mad Magazine and other satire; or anyone with a degree in Latin or philosophy, or even if you're a frustrated writer stifled over care to the craft, "Shandy" is the book for you.

It's crazy fun -- missing pages, the infamous marbled page, black pages, drawings of pointing fingers, digression after digression on such diverse topics as armaments, noses, and fasting, and one of the most self-conscious, self-referential narrative voices in all of fiction. Literary critics point to Shandy as one of the first examples of postmodernist writing.

Sterne presages the modern tendency towards meta-fiction, that blurry limbo between fact and fiction. The controversy over "A Million Little Pieces," reality television, the movies "Adaption" and "American Splendor," along with the stream-of-consciousness style of Kerouac and the Beat Movement -- any work where the creator's ego/persona interjects into the narrative -- owes a creative debt to Tristram Shandy.

I saw the movie and decided to read the book to make sense of it all. Of course, the book was no help. Sense has no place in the "Shandean" universe. The intrepid reader should just roll with it, laugh at the absurdities and highlight in pencil the little nuggets of wisdom contained herein.

A canonic novel the worthy will love
Although my motivation alone to read Life and Opinions speaks to its literary value (it is required reading for esteemed and illustrious Professor Priscilla "Sawcebox" Gilman's Eighteenth Century British Novels course at the prestigious and highly selective Vassar College in the scenic Hudson Valley of New York), I have discovered that it actually lives up to its assigned space in the canon.For those who are connoisseur-enough to understand that it takes patience, devotion, and a well-rounded understanding of vulgarity to get through an obra-maestra such as this, it is truly a fun read.At times I find myself daring to laugh out loud (lol) to Sterne's outlandish and fearless narrative.After such morally righteous (dull) tales as Pamela and Joseph Andrews, this novel is a welcome release.FINALLY here is an author who knows how to take charge of his readership and completely disregards their wishes while acknowledging and thriving off of their existence.Unlike the other little girly writers of his age who chew day and night on their anxiety of criticism, Sterne addresses his critics directly, super-manly, and does the most masculine thing of all: he makes fun of them.I mean, what better credit can one do for oneself other than to make a spectacle of those who think differently?In conclusion, don't attempt this one if you aren't a careful reader: it will just be words on a page, page after page, with a few anomalies stuck in.For the adventurous reader, carpe librum!However, I will offer one word of advice; watch for the pointed finger hand- therein little nuggets of truth, perfect for the mantle. ... Read more

Book Description
Laurence Sterne was in his mid-forties when the publication of Tristram Shandy catapulted him from obscurity into unprecedented literary fame.The story of how a provincial clergyman became the most fashionable writer of his day is extraordinary, and all the more remarkable for having been engineered by its subject.'I wrote not to be fed, but to be famous', Laurence Sterne declared of his comic masterpiece, and in order to achieve his ambition he became an assiduous networker, as astute a self-publicist as any modern author could hope to be.Shocked critics of Tristram Shandy denounced his bawdy novel as a scandal to the cloth but Sterne revelled in the celebrity his age's obsession with novelty and fashion allowed him.He at last found compensation for a life characterized by alternating moods of gaiety and gloom.Unhappily married to a woman who suffered a nervous breakdown and at one time believed herself to be the Queen of Bohemia, Sterne became notorious for his sexual and sentimental liaisons with other women. His second book, A Sentimental Journey, transmuted his experiences into literary expressions of moral feeling.Dependent for so much of his life on patrons, it was the patronage of the reading public that was to secure his livelihood.Tristram Shandy remains one of the most innovative and influential novels in world literature, and Ian Campbell Ross makes full use of important new materials to examine Sterne's life and career and the cult of the celebrity author. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An Odd Author and His Spectacularly Odd and Funny Book
_Laurence Sterne: A Life_ (Oxford University Press), by Ian Campbell Ross, is a dandy new biography which I will tell you about.But the only real reason to be reading about Sterne is to increase appreciation of his wonderful book, _The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman_, which has been making people laugh for almost two and a half centuries.So let me make the recommendation first of that book to you, if you have never read it.Go read it, and when you finish, I'll be right here.

There!What did I tell you?Intelligent, chaotic, witty amusement, with some bawdiness thrown in.I don't need to tell you of the thousand odd attractions of the book.It is one of the most fun of the classics.Now to the fine book at hand.Sterne was, Ross shows, just as peculiar as his book, and had as chaotic a life.Sterne lived only eight years after bursting onto the scene with _Tristram Shandy_, and to Ross's credit, he has made Sterne's pre-Shandy years interesting.Sterne had led a modest, impecunious life of a vicar in Yorkshire.He did a bit of political writing, but nothing that would have prepared anyone for his comic masterpiece.He had an unhappy marriage, and a remarkable interest in adultery.

Then in 1759, the first two of the nine volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ were published, and caused a sensation.The reviews were very good, and if readers were puzzled by the extraordinary digressions and puzzles in the book, they laughed at them, and they bought them up.Then Sterne appeared in London, and was delighted to wear his black ministerial garments everywhere.This brought his book notoriety as well as fame; reviewers changed tone from praising the book's hilarity to criticizing the vicar for writing "downright gross and obscene expressions."Sterne became a hot ticket at dinners and salons.The zany mixture of adventures and accidents, farcical and sad, reflected the life of the author.

This was an odd man, to be sure, who produced an odd book.Ross's elegant and thorough biography brings Sterne to life for our age.The gregarious James Boswell wrote that Sterne was "the best companion I ever knew," and those who find him to be a good companion in the form of his famous book will find him an even better one after reading this illuminating biography. ... Read more

Book Description
The sixth volume of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne contains scholarly editions of two works of Sterne's last year of life, A Sentimental Journey and the Bramine's Journal (Journal to Eliza). As with the first five volumes of the series (Tristram Shandy, the Sermons, and their annotations), the texts are presented as clean texts, with all textual and scholarly apparatus gathered at the end of the volume, including collations with existing manuscripts, a historical collation of the first three editions of Journey, and a comprehensive listing of all emendations made to the texts. While relying on the scholarly edition of Journey by Gardner Stout (1967), this new edition has in many ways, both textual and annotative, altered his earlier work; and it presents as well the first truly scholarly edition of the Journal since Lewis Perry Curtis's edition in Letters (1935).

This book continues the tradition of the Florida Edition, providing an abundance of materials that are intended to elucidate but not interpret Sterne's writings. New and Day build on Stout's fine annotations, but they add the commentaries of the intervening 35 years, along with some new recoveries and discoveries, and some corrections to Stout's edition. The annotations to the Journal go well beyond Curtis's commentary, especially in drawing a strong relationship between the Journey and the Journal. As the editors argue in the extensive introduction, the two texts must be read together in order to be understood properly.

Sterne's writings in his last year belong together as the complex representation of his hopes and fears, his loves and his longings, as he prepared to face death and judgment. The dual presentation in this volume will not only enhance the reputation of the Bramin's Journal, but will bring to light aspects of A Sentimental Journey previously unnoted.

Melvyn New is professor of English at the University of Florida and general editor of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, five volumes of which have been published. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Portrait of the Artist as a Dying Man
Laurence Sterne may have been one of the most peculiar authors who ever lived.Spending most of his life as a provincial Anglican clergyman (albeit a randy one) with a wife he didn't get along with and on whom he cheated compulsively, troubled by the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him, he became famous overnight in his mid-forties with the publication of the first volumes of Tristram Shandy in 1760.While Sterne has never lacked for either admirers or detractors (some of the former are Thomas Jefferson, Friedrich Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf; examples of the latter are Samuel Johnson and William Makepeace Thackeray), he has somehow survived as one of the magnificent oddities of English literature.

Since the 1970s, Sterne's greatest champion has been Dr. Melvyn New of the University of Florida, whose edition of Sterne's Works has become the standard texts of Tristram Shandy and his Sermons.Now Dr. New has added a sixth volume to the series, consisting of A Sentimental Journey and Continuation of the Bramine's Journal.

At the time Sterne began A Sentimental Journey in 1767 (he never finished it -- what we have are the first two volumes of a projected four), he was at a crossroads in his career as a writer.The later volumes of Tristram Shandy had not sold as well or caused the stir of the earlier volumes, and Sterne may have felt that he had taken its strain of satiric ribaldry as far as it could go -- at any rate, he decided to change course, and to indulge in the then-popular mode of fictional pathos.To elicit a furtive tear, rather than a sly guffaw, was now his aim, and whether this was simple careerism or a genuine change of heart is for each reader to decide (although the evidence of the Bramine's Journal, never intended for publication, indicates that the latter was most likely the case).

The text of A Sentimental Journey doesn't present insurmountable difficulties (Sterne, unlike Swift, always scrupulously prepared his works for the press, and in any event Dr. New has the precedent, graciously acknowledged, of Gardner Stout's 1967 University of California Press edition), but the Florida edition, as impeccable as its scholarship is, is more interesting for what it doesn't do than for what it does.Unlike the Stout edition, in which a tiny island of text can be overwhelmed by a tsunami of annotation, New's Florida text is unencumbered by its nonetheless impressive scholarly apparatus, which is printed in the back.Dr. New is that academic rarity -- a scholar who actually gives a damn about the non-scholarly reader.The result, as with the rest of the Florida Sterne, is an edition that manages to have it both ways -- impeccable scholarship that does not overwhelm a text that is presented in a way so that it can be enjoyed for its own sake.Would that there were more editors like him.

Sterne is the poet of nuance (although at times his more earthy side takes over -- at one point he asks a woman hidden from him by a curtain "if she wanted anything," and gets back the reply, "Rien que pisser," which means just what you think it means), and there are times when the more lachrymal sentiments of the late 18th Century, so trendy then, feel strained now.But he sometimes managed to combine his empathy for others with his appreciation of the odd and the grotesque, as when he notices, at the opera comique, a dwarf with his view blocked by a "tall, corpulent German, near seven feet high, who stood directly betwixt him and all possibility of his seeing either the stage or the actors."

Mostly, however, A Sentimental Journey is about the exhilarating minutiae of traveling, unencumbered (as Sterne was at times when he made the journeys in France and Italy that inspired the book) by either wife of child, and moving through, as he mentions several times, a country with which his own was, at that time, at war."I seldom go to the place I set out for," Sterne comments at one point, and the unpredictability of his peregrinations make the book feel more like life, and less like literature, than most books of his time -- or even ours.He can manage a delicacy of feeling combined with an intricacy of expression that make him seem a precursor of Proust.

The other work contained in the volume, Continuation of the Bramine's Journal (one wishes that Dr. New had been a tad less pedantically accurate and chosen instead the less holographically correct but inarguably more effective title that Sterne biographer Wilbur L. Cross gave it: the Journal to Eliza) is a diary kept by Sterne in the last year of his life and intended for a 23-year-old married woman named Eliza Draper, with whom Sterne had become hopelessly infatuated (an infatuation all the more hopeless since the lady's husband was in Bombay, where Eliza would soon join him).At their parting Sterne began keeping a journal that he assumed would be reciprocated by Eliza, and that at some point they would meet again and share their respective sentiments.Never published during his lifetime, it makes Sterne seem either hopelessly romantic or more than a little pathetic -- depending, I suppose, on one's age and/or gender.At any event, Sterne never saw Eliza again.

Together, these two works of the final year of Sterne's life give us both an impressive and moving Portrait of the Artist as a Dying Man, and Dr. New and the University Press of Florida are to be congratulated for their persistence in putting out, over a period of three decades, so splendid an edition of a classic author.This latest volume more than lives up to the high standards of the previous five, and should be read by anyone even remotely curious about one of the most curious and brilliant authors ever to write in English. ... Read more

Book Description
Series Editors: James Nagel, University of Georgia; Zack Bowen, University of Miami and Robert Lecker, McGill University

The full range of literary traditions comes to life in the Twayne Critical Essays Series. Volume editors have carefully selected critical essays that represent the full spectrum of controversies, trends and methodologies relating to each author's work. Essays include writings from the author's native country and abroad, with interpretations from the time they were writing, through the present day. Each volume includes:

• An introduction providing the reader with a lucid overview of criticism from itsbeginnings-illuminating controversies, evaluating approaches, and sorting out the schools of thought
• The most influential reviews and the best reprinted scholarly essays
• A section devoted exclusively to reviews and reactions by the subject's contemporaries
• Original essays, new translations, and revisions commissioned especially for the series
• Previously unpublished materials such as interviews, lost letters andmanuscript fragments
• A bibliography of the subject's writings and interviews
• A name and subject index

Book Description
Traditionally, Laurence Sterne's writing is discussed either in relation to the modern fiction that it anticipates or in the context of its Renaissance and early-eighteenth-century antecedents. Focusing primarily on the nine years of his literary career, Parnell shows how Sterne's fiction is illuminated by the contemporary cultural conditions and preoccupations that enabled its extraordinary success and helped shape its concerns. ... Read more

Book Description
Cliffs Test Preparation Guides help students prepare for and improve their performance on standardized tests ACT Preparation Guide CBEST Preparation Guide CLAST Preparation Guide ELM Review GMAT Preparation Guide GRE Preparation Guide LSAT Preparation Guide MAT Preparation Guide MATH Review for Standardized Tests MSAT Preparation Guide Memory Power for Exams Police Officer Examination Preparation Guide Police Sergeant Examination Preparation Guide Police Management Examinations Preparation Guide Postal Examinations Preparation Guide Praxis I: PPST Preparation Guide Praxis II: NTE Core Battery Preparation Guide SAT Preparation Guide SAT II Writing Preparation Guide TASP Preparation Guide TOEFL Preparation Guide with 2 cassettes Advanced Practice for the TOEFL with 2 cassettes Verbal Review for Standardized Tests Writing Proficiency Examinations You Can Pass the GED Cliffs Quick Reviews help students in introductory college courses or Advanced Placement classes Algebra I Algebra II Anatomy & Physiology Basic Math and Pre-Algebra Biology Calculus Chemistry Differential Equations Economics Geometry Linear Algebra Microbiology Physics Statistics Trigonometry Cliffs Advanced Placement Preparation Guides help high school students taking Advanced Placement courses to earn college credit AP Biology AP Calculus AB AP Chemistry AP English Language & Composition AP English Literature & Composition AP United States History Cliffs Complete Study Editions are comprehensive study guides with complete text, running commentary and glossary Chaucer's Prologue Chaucer's Wife of Bath Hamlet Julius Caesar King Henry IV, Part I King Lear Macbeth The Merchant of Venice Othello Romeo and Juliet The Tempest Twelfth Night See inside back cover for listing of Cliffs Notes titles Registered trademarks include: GRE, MSAT, the Praxis Series, and TOEFL (Educational Testing Service): AP, Advanced Placement Program, and SAT (College Entrance Examination Board); GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Council); and LSAT (Law School Admission Council.) Tristram Shandy ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Analysis of the "marble page" and Narrative Failure.
Tristram Shandy is a novel about human understanding.One of the things that Sterne believed about humanity is that things were constantly changing; always in flux, if you will. Historically speaking, he was of theLockian generation which displaced uman understanding into two categories,wit and association.Sterne was a believer in association, and attributedto that the idea of the "hobby-horse." This meant the menialquirks that each and every human had, such is the case with the sexualexpeditions of the characters within. With the idea of human flux and thehobby-horse, we are brought to the "marble page," which is, inand of itself, a hermeneutical circle for defining the rest of the book.Sterne presents this page to illustrate uniqueness of individuals and theunpredeictability of the process of writing.Which brings me to my nextpoint, the concept of narrative failure. Throughout the strange goings onof the book, we come to points in the writing in which Sterne includes thereader into the disorder of the narrative. In Volume IV, Sterne mentionsthe process of the book in which he has done one year of writing, and yetcome only to the first day of his life. This is the failure he is showingus, and the manner in which he creates this outrageous tale. These twoaspects of Tristram Shandy are intrical in understanding and enjoying thechaos of this book. ... Read more

Book Description

Tristram Shandy provoked a literary sensation when it first appeared in a series of installments between 1759 and 1767. The ribald, high-spirited book prompted Diderot to hail Sterne as 'the English Rabelais.' An ingeniously structured novel (about writing a novel) that fascinates like a verbal game of chess, Tristram Shandy is both a joyful celebration of the infinite possibilities of the art of fiction and a wry demonstration of its limitations. Many view this picaresque masterpiece as the precursor of the modern novel.

A Sentimental Journey, which came out in 1768, begins as a travelogue. Yet it ends as a treasury of portraits, sketches, and philosophical musings, for as Virginia Woolf observed: 'A Sentimental Journey, for all its levity and wit, is based upon something fundamentally philosophic--the philosophy of pleasure.'Download Description
Tristam Shandy provoked a literary sensation when it first appeared in a series of installments between 1759 and 1767. The ribald, high-spirited book promted Diderot to hail Sterne as "the English Rabelais." An ingeniously structured novel (about writing a novel) that fascinates like a verbal game of chess, Tristram Shandy is both a joyful celebration of the infinite possibilities of the art of fiction and a wry demonstration of its limitations. Many view this picaresque masterpiece as the precursor of the modern novel. ... Read more