Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel [Hardcover]

Tristram is the Fashion, Sterne gleefully wrote of his masterpiece,Tristram Shandy, in 1760. This study reads Sterne's writing alongside other trends and texts of the time, showing how Sterne created and sustained his own vogue through self-conscious play on his rivals' work. The result is a highly original account of a major early novelist, and of the way his writing reveals and defines what one witness called thisShandy-Age.

List of illustrations
List of abbreviations
Introduction
I. Narrative Discourse and Print Culture fromPamelatoTristram Shandy
1. Sterne and the 'new species of writing'
2. Novels, print, and meaning
II. The Serialization ofTristram Shandy
3. The practice and poetics of serial fiction
4. Serializing a self
III. Sterne in the literary culture of the 1760s
5.Tristram Shandyand the freshest moderns
6. The literature of Whiggism and the politics of war

Keymer [has] a gift for beautiful and sharply observant prose, and more than that, a quickness of intelligence that illuminates everything he touches on.... Keymer deepens our understanding both of the ways in which Sterne's experiments with novelistic resources are grounded in mid-eighteenth-century conventions and tropes and of how Sterne appeals far beyond the eighteenth century to our own absorption in the problems of representation and indeterminacy. In its breadth, elegance, and economy this is exemplary work. --Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

In this learned and polemical study, Keymer putsTristram Shandyback into its own age.... Keymer is the right man for the job: few scholars have read as widely, especially in the obscure novels of the 1750s.... This is a provocative, well researched, and very readabll3Î