Tristram Shandy: An Authoritative Text, the Author on the Novel, Criticism (Norton Critical Editions)

by Laurence Sterne (Author), Laurence Sterne (Author), Howard Anderson (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1979

  $4.32

  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.

• Used

  Paperback
  1968

  $14.61

• Used

  Hardcover
  1975

  $3.35

• New

  Paperback
  1996

  $7.16

  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'.