Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel

"Tristram is the Fashion," Sterne gleefully wrote of his masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, in 1760. This study reads Sterne's writing alongside other trends and texts of the time, showing how Sterne created and sustained his own vogue through self-conscious play on his rivals' work. The result is a highly original account of a major early novelist, and of the way his writing reveals and defines what one witness called "this Shandy-Age."

"Tristram is the Fashion," Sterne gleefully wrote of his masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, in 1760. This study reads Sterne's writing alongside other trends and texts of the time, showing how Sterne created and sustained his own vogue through self-conscious play on his rivals' work. The result is a highly original account of a major early novelist, and of the way his writing reveals and defines what one witness called "this Shandy-Age."

Thomas Keymer is Elmore Fellow and Tutor in English at St Anne's College, Oxford and Lecturer in English Language and Literature, University of Oxford. He is the author of Richardson's Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (CUP 1992); editor of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings (Everyman 1994), Henry Fielding's The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (Penguin 1996); and co-editor of the six volumes of The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, 1740-1750 (Pickering and Chatto 2001), Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (World's Classics 2001), Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Shamela (World's Classics 1999), and volume 1 of Prefaces, Postscripts, and Related Writings of Samuel Richardson (Pickering and Chatto 1998).