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On Sterne’s Page: Tristram Shandy

On Sterne’s Page: Spatial Layout, Spatial Form, and Social Spaces in Tristram Shandy

Christopher Fanning, City University of New York

Volume 10, no. 4, July 1998

©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.

ABSTRACT

Since the time of its first publication, readers of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) have struggled to account for its oddities of appearance and narrative method. Its lack of conventional novelistic form has caused critics to wonder whether Tristram Shandy is a “novel” or rather some variety of philosophical commentary or anatomical satire. One answer to the problem of generic coherence has been to follow Tristram’s own suggestion that he “must go along with you to the end of the work.” Following Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, one recurrent focus of criticism has been the sense of the narrator’s presence as the unifying principle of the work. Part of what ultimately obviates the need for strict generic definitions is the way in which Tristram, as Booth phrases it, “has ceased here to be distinguishable from what he relates.” Sterne’s unique integration of the sense of the narrator’s presence into the formal structure of the narrative has had important implications for the history of narrative. Only recently, however, with renewed interest in the print culture of the era, has a further extension of this integration become apparent. A consideration of Sterne’s attention to the physical material of the book in relation to questions of narrative presence in Tristram Shandy has become necessary.

Other ECF articles on the topic of “Laurence Sterne” include:

Consuming Indians: Tsonnonthouan, Colonialism, and the Commodification of Culture
by ROBBIE RICHARDSON (ECF 22.4, Summer 2010)

The Literary History of the Sash Window
by RACHEL RAMSEY (ECF 22.2, Winter 2009-10)

Talking Coins and Thinking Smoke-Jacks: Satirizing Materialism in Gildon and Sterne
by SCOTT NOWKA (ECF 22.2, Winter 2009-10)

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