Tristram Shandy (Norton Critical Editions) - Softcover

Sterne, Laurence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393950344 ISBN 13: 9780393950342

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980

Synopsis

This edition of "the most modern of eighteenth-century novels" reprints the text of the first edition of the volumes of Tristram Shandy as they appeared from December 1759 to January 1767, including the two illustrations by Hogarth.

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. Original illustratons by Hogarth included

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Introduction and Notes by Robert Folkenflik

Rich in playful double entendres, digressions, formal oddities, and typographical experiments, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman provoked a literary sensation when it first appeared in England in a series of volumes from 1759 to 1767. An ingeniously structured novel (about writing a novel) that fascinates like a verbal game of chess, "Tristram Shandy is the most protean and playful English novel of the eighteenth century and a celebration of the art of fiction; its inventiveness anticipates the work of Joyce, Rushdie, and Fuentes in our own century. This Modern Library Paperback is set from the nine-volume first edition from 1759.

From the Back Cover:

With its ingenious structure and its exuberant pretense of being an autobiography, Tristram Shandy fascinates like a verbal game of chess.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1980
• ISBN 10: 0393950344
• ISBN 13: 9780393950342
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 650
• Editor: Anderson Howard