TRISTAM SHANDY

Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a literacy paradox, for it is both a novel and an anti-novel. As a comic novel replete with bawdy humour and generous sentiments, it introduces us to a vivid group of memorable characters, variously eccentric, farcical and endearing. As an anti-novel, it is a deliberately tantalising and egoistic work, ostentatiously digressive, involving the reader in the labyrinthine creation of a purported autobiography.