Tristram Shandy's World Sterne's Philosophical Rhetoric

Tristram Shandy’s World: Sterne’s Philosophical Rhetoric by John Traugott offers a major reappraisal of Laurence Sterne’s most provocative work, arguing that Tristram Shandy is less a “novel” than a sustained rhetorical performance. Traugott situates Sterne within the intellectual currents of the eighteenth century, showing how his writing warps and reconfigures Lockean philosophy, rhetorical handbooks, and Augustan traditions of learned wit into a new mode of philosophical comedy. Sterne, Traugott contends, was not merely whimsical or sentimental—charges leveled by earlier critics—but a serious and deliberate rhetorician who used paradox, irony, and dialectical play to test the limits of meaning, sentiment, and human self-knowledge.

By analyzing Sterne’s persistent rhetorical traps, his manipulation of wit as both method and subject, and his ironic engagement with Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Traugott demonstrates how Tristram Shandy becomes a “history of the reader’s mind.” The book foregrounds Sterne’s technique of implicating his audience in logical snares and sentimental indulgences, then forcing them to confront their own motives and contradictions. This study also emphasizes Sterne’s formal control, including his inventive use of punctuation and rhetorical form, as central to his philosophical purpose. Both a close reading of Sterne’s artistry and a broader meditation on eighteenth-century intellectual culture, Tristram Shandy’s World reframes Sterne as a major figure in the history of ideas whose experimental rhetoric continues to illuminate the interplay of philosophy, literature, and human nature.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1954.