Tristram Shandy, Essayist

The genre of Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is a long-standing critical crux. Indeed, the work wears its complex generic mixtures on its sleeve even as it references the great borrowers from whom Sterne learned to borrow: Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, Burton. This chapter focuses on Sterne’s use of Montaigne’s Essays as a model for a generic procedure that informs Sterne’s writing in its organization (or disorganization), its self-conscious gathering of texts, its free commentary, and its interactivity with both its contexts of citation and its readers. Tristram Shandy is a watershed text in which the full range of the essay tradition is revisited, adapted, used, and abused to form a conversational, bookish, self-conscious, and digressive work that is as much essay as novel.