You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
With their appearance during the 1760s, the five instalments of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman caused something like a booksellers' hype. Small publishers and anonymous imitators seized on Sterne's success by bringing out great numbers of spurious new volumes, critical or ironic pamphlets, and works that in style and title express a congeniality with Tristram Shandy. This study explores these eighteenth-century imitations as indicators of contemporary assumptions about Sterne's intentions. Comparisons between the original, the first reactions, and a number of late eighteenth-century imitations, show that Tristram Shandy was initially read against the ba...