Tristram Shandy (Wordsworth Classics) - Softcover

A lot of nonsense is written about Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman -- and that's just as well. It would be depressing in the extreme if this triumphant tangling up of the threads of reason with the strands of linear narrative were to admit of any effective unravelling; which is as much to say, that were you to find yourself picking apart a lucid, non-discursive exposition of the novel - its themes, its techniques, its plot -- you would know that you had finally gone mad. --Will Self

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'.