The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy
First published AD 1759, written in English
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, often known simply as Tristram Shandy, is a humorous novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published from 1759 to 1767, in nine volumes across five instalments. The novel purports to be a memoir, but the titular Tristram is an effusive and digressive narrator who begins the story with his conception and does not reach a description of his birth until the third volume. While attempting to explain four accidents in his early life which have doomed him to an unhappy future, Tristram describes domestic conflicts between his irritable father Walter and his gentle Uncle Toby, and inserts humorous discourses on a range of intellectual topics.
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What it draws on
- Essays
Michel de Montaigne, AD 1580
Montaigne, who wrote himself by digressing, contradicting himself and following his thoughts wherever they led, is one of the writers Sterne draws on and quotes most.
Source: Wikipedia, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
“Sterne also frequently draws on Essays by the sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, Of Death by the early scientist Francis Bacon, Swift's Battle of the Books, and the Scriblerian collaborative work The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus.” Read it there
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