Another Ride on Tristram’s Hobby-Horse

Ian Campbell Ross’s 2009 edition of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a revised version of his 1983 edition, is a reliable and student-friendly edition of the “most talked-about book of the age” (vii). We would expect this from Ross, who has also written Laurence Sterne: A Life (2001) and published widely on various aspects of eighteenth-century literature and culture. The edition, which follows the first editions of Sterne’s volumes, features a brief introduction in which Ross explains the overwhelming number of literary models and sources that Sterne invokes in his nine-volume masterpiece. He also provides a knowledgeable account of Sterne’s life and other literary works and conveys the extensive influence Sterne had on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. Ross pays careful attention to the novel’s peculiar typographical features, and what distinguishes his annotations from the ones offered in the Florida edition (1978) is that they situate the work within a historical context without demanding that we read the novel as an extension of the satirical tradition. For these reasons, Ross’s edition is probably the most suitable for teaching, and it would pair effectively with Thomas Keymer’s Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Casebook.

Keymer’s introduction reminds us that contemporaneous responses to Tristram Shandy were wide-ranging: many readers understood it as a parody of the conventions of realism established by Richardson and Fielding, while others situated it within the tradition of learned wit and Renaissance satire. Some believed it to be a satire on European expansion and colonialism, others thought Sterne had formalized a brand of sentimental ethics, and a few argued that the novel approximated a version of Romantic irony. And, of course, many thought it was just nonsense. The essays in this casebook demonstrate that our modern responses are equally conflicted.

The essays are presented in pairs, and the collection is strikingly coherent and reads as an intense and respectful conversation among Sterne scholars. In the first section, J. T. Parnell and Keymer consider whether we should place Tristram Shandy within the Renaissance tradition of learned wit and fideistic skepticism or instead consider the work as a critique of the emerging genre of the novel. Writing from a literary-historical perspective, Parnell demonstrates how and to what effect writers such as Erasmus, Rabelais, and Montaigne influenced both the form and content of work written by Swift and Sterne. By implicating Sterne in this particular tradition of skepticism, Parnell pushes us to reconsider a number of truths that we have taken for granted in Sterne scholarship. Keymer, on the other hand, wants to read Sterne in the context of the modern novel, though he demonstrates that his method actually corresponds to Parnell’s: “to acknowledge the prominence of the learned wit tradition in Sterne’s writing need not be to deny the deliberacy of its engagement with newer forms. Instead we may find within it a cornucopia of textual relations in which Menippean satire and metafictional self-consciousness coexist and unfold themselves in different intertextual modes, and display, as they do so, a hybridization of traditions and genres that in itself is typically novelistic” (51). To my mind, Keymer’s compromise makes good sense, especially when we consider the essays on performance and print culture.

Of these, Peter M. Briggs’s essay describes how Sterne transformed himself from a poor country parson into one of the most celebrated “sensations” of eighteenth-century culture. Not only did Sterne “pose” simultaneously as Yorick and Tristram (writing shandaical letters and acting like an oddball friend of the people), but he also developed networks and “was deliberately courting attacks in the public press, realizing that controversy would help to sell his books” (84). Sterne catered to the new expectations that the eighteenth-century public had of authors: to publicly perform...