Keymer goes on to question whether Sterne is satirising the modern novel at all in Tristram Shandy: In fact the ‘new species of writing’ referred to is borrowed from an essay written in 1751 about Fielding, not Sterne. The genre of prose fiction was itself still ‘novel’ (hence the name), and to see Tristram Shandy as a satire or comment on the ‘novel’ as genre is a total misunderstanding of its place in literary history.

Witness the Richardson-Fielding dispute of the 1740s, which was as much about competing narrative strategies as it was about religion and ethics, or ideologies of gender and class. Sterne writes at a time when the conventions of fictional representation, such as they were, remained fluid, ill-defined, and keenly contested. They will then tell you that Sterne’s achievement with Tristram Shandy represents a revolutionary new approach to fiction and narrative, parodying and satirising the realistic prose style that had come to typify the genre up to that point in history.īut as Thomas Keymer points out in his essay ‘Sterne and the “new species of writing”‘, collected in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Casebook (Amazon affiliate link), this adopts a view of the history of the novel that post-dates Sterne’s time of writing. The contemporary situation was not so straight forward, as Keymer explains: It commits the worst crime that literature is capable of, in that it fails to provide adequate motivation for the reader to turn the page.Īdmirers will say that Sterne intended it to be frustrating, as if this makes the frustration acceptable. I’d go further and say that it is literally ‘pointless’.

Even the book’s admirers admit that it is ‘frustrating’ for the reader. I’ve read around it and I understand the reasons why Tristram Shandy is considered a classic, but my problems with the book are based entirely on the experience of reading it. It’s been a laborious task, and I’m afraid not a happy one. I have been reading and studying Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman for the past couple of months. The Damnation of Obadiah, from Tristram Shandy, hand-coloured etching by James Bretherton, 1773

The life and times of tristram shandy