> Skip to content
  • Published: 15 September 2004
  • ISBN: 9780375761195
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 704
  • RRP: $37.00
Categories:

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman




Penguin Classics relaunch.

Introduction and Notes by Robert Folkenflik


Rich in playful double entendres, digressions, formal oddities, and typographical experiments, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman provoked a literary sensation when it first appeared in England in a series of volumes from 1759 to 1767. An ingeniously structured novel (about writing a novel) that fascinates like a verbal game of chess, Tristram Shandy is the most protean and playful English novel of the eighteenth century and a celebration of the art of fiction; its inventiveness anticipates the work of Joyce, Rushdie, and Fuentes in our own century. This Modern Library Paperback is set from the nine-volume first edition from 1759.

  • Published: 15 September 2004
  • ISBN: 9780375761195
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 704
  • RRP: $37.00
Categories:

Other books in the series

Maldoror and Poems
On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Laurence Sterne

Date: 2013-08-06
Laurence Sterne was born in 1713, the younger son of a landowning Yorkshire family. He studied at Jesus College, Cambridge and was ordained in 1738. Sterne's dramas were mostly personal, including bitter quarrels with his wife and uncle, and some high profile affairs. The publication of the first volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy in 1759 made him famous throughout Europe overnight. He went on to complete the remaining volumes over the next seven years. Sterne died in 1768 of tuberculosis, the condition that had dogged him for many years.

Irish-born Laurence Sterne graduated from Cambridge in 1737 and took holy orders, becoming a prebend in York Cathedral. His masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy made him a celebrity but ill-health necessitated recuperative travel and A Sentimental Journey grew out of seven-month trip through France and Italy. He died the year it was published, 1768.

Also by Laurence Sterne

See all