The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

by Laurence Sterne (Author), Laurence Sterne (Author), Ian Campbell Ross (Editor), Laurence Sterne (Author)

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  paperback
  

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  'Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader! read...' Sterne's great comic novel is the fictional autobiography of Tristram Shandy, a hero who fails even to get born in the first two volumes. It contains some of the best-known and best-loved characters in English literature, including Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Parson Yorick, Dr Slop and the Widow Wadman. Beginning with Tristram's conception, the novel recounts his progress in 'this scurvy and disasterous world of ours', including his misnaming during baptism and his accidental circumcision by a falling sash-window at the age of five; unsurprisingly, Tristram declares that he has been 'the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune'. Tristram Shandy also offers the narrator's 'opinions', at once facetious and highly serious, on books and learning in an age of rapidly expanding print culture, and on the changing understanding of the roles of writers and readers alike. This revised edition retains the first edition text incorporating Sterne's later changes, and adds two original Hogarth illustrations and a wealth of contextualizing information. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.45

  '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.

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  Hardcover
  1975

  $6.26

• New

  Paperback
  1996

  $7.55

  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'.