Shandyism, Or, the Novel in Its Assy Shape: African Apuleius, The Golden Ass, and Prose Fiction
Margaret Anne Doody, University of Notre Dame
Volume 12, no. 2-3, January-April 2000
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ABSTRACT
“But with an ass I can commune for ever.” So says Tristram Shandy, taking us into his confidence as usual, after describing the ass he encountered in Lyons, at the gate of the Basse Cour of his inn. Sterne has just engaged in a riff that gives his game away, telling the curious and enlightened reader that his story is related to the tradition of the Ass-Novel, or Esel-Roman (as German scholars say). It is my contention that Sterne’s novel is clearly related to the greater of the surviving Ass-Novels of antiquity, Apuleius’s Asinus aureus, or Metamorphoses.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Rise of the Novel” include:
The Empty Decade? English Fiction in the 1730s
by LACY MARSCHALK, MALLORY ANNE PORCH, & PAULA R. BACKSCHEIDER (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)
Ideal Friendship and the Paradoxes of Narration in Sarah Fielding’s David Simple
by BRYAN MANGANO (ECF 26.2, Winter 2013-14)
Devotional Reading and Novel Form: The Case of David Simple
by TERA PATTELLA (ECF 24.2, Winter 2011-12)
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