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
  

  $12.39

  '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
  1979

  $3.39

  Obvious errors have been corrected, but most of the conventions of eighteenth-century printing and all of Sterne's brilliant exploitations and expansions of those conventions have been retained. Background information includes a chronology of Sterne's life and comments from his letters pertaining to the composition of the novel and to his theory of fiction. Responses by Sterne's contemporaries-among them Walpole, Goldsmith, Richardson, and Johnson-begin the selection of critical materials. Early-nineteenth-century assessments by Coleridge, Hazlitt, Scott, and Thackeray are followed by twentieth-century critical essays by Lodwick Hartley, D. W. Jefferson, Toby A. Olshin, Wayne Booth, William Bowman Piper, Martin Price, Jean Jacques Mayoux, Richard A. Lanham, Sigurd Burkhardt, J. Paul Hunter, Charles Parish, and Howard Anderson.

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  Hardcover
  1975

  $3.39

• New

  Paperback
  1996

  $7.70

  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'.