The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Oxford World's Classics)

by Laurence Sterne (Author), IanCampbellRoss (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $5.98

  'Who has not Tristram Shandy read? Is any mortal so ill bred?' So wrote the young James Boswell in the spring of 1760, when Sterne's comic novel was received with extravagant popular acclaim and some bewilderment. Indeed, how can one describe a novel whose hero-narrator fails in the first two volumes even to get himself born? A narrator who, in a series of digressions he calls the 'sunshine' of reading, interests us instead in such characters as his uncle Toby, a devotee of wargames in the garden, or Parson Yorick, a self-portrait of the author? The text of this Oxford World's Classics edition is based on the first editions of all nine volumes. No unnecessary modernization has obscured Sterne's idiosyncratic presentation of the novel.

• Used

  Paperback
  1968

  $18.35

• Used

  Hardcover
  1975

  $3.36

• New

  Paperback
  1996

  $7.18

  With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a huge literary paradox, for it is both a novel and an anti-novel. As a comic novel replete with bawdy humour and generous sentiments, it introduces us to a vivid group of memorable characters, variously eccentric, farcical and endearing. As an anti-novel, it is a deliberately tantalising and exuberantly egoistic work, ostentatiously digressive, involving the reader in the labyrinthine creation of a purported autobiography. This mercurial eighteenth-century text thus anticipates modernism and postmodernism. Vibrant and bizarre, Tristram Shandy provides an unforgettable experience. We may see why Nietzsche termed Sterne 'the most liberated spirit of all time'.