Introduction

Summary

In the 250th anniversary year of Tristram Shandy, and with the tercentenary of his birth impending, Laurence Sterne remains at the heart of our thinking about narrative representation, the traditions of satire, and some of the most intriguing cultural phenomena of the eighteenth century: the sensibility vogue; the rise of celebrity authorship; transformations in the understanding of personal identity and selfhood. Yet Sterne’s formidable achievement as an author was the work of less than a decade. He lived in obscurity as a provincial clergyman for a quarter of a century, and witnessed the suppression of his first sustained work of satire, A Political Romance, by church authorities, but shot to international fame with his comic masterpiece Tristram Shandy, the inaugural volumes of which appeared in the closing weeks of 1759. With four further instalments published over the next seven years (closing with a ninth volume of 1767, at which point Tristram Shandy, as one early reader beautifully put it, ‘could not either be properly said to have been left finished or unfinished’ (CH 236)), Sterne held a central position in the literary culture of his day until his death from consumption in 1768. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, his most popular and influential work in the decades to follow, had appeared just three weeks beforehand. To many readers at the time, the innovative gestures and experimental techniques of Sterne’s writing, alongside its insouciant defiance of established decorum, marked a decisive break with the literary past, or even seemed to usher in what the dominant novelist of the previous generation resentfully called a ‘Shandy-Age’.