Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Tradition of Dissent (original) (raw)

amuel Johnson's famous dismissal of laurence sterne's Tristram Shandy ("nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last." 1), may be one of the most shortsighted critical claims in literary history. after all, sterne's novel has been variously, and repeatedly, cited as a major influence on modernism and postmodernism 2 , as a forerunner to the major metafictional texts of the twentieth century, and calvino's claim that Tristram Shandy is the "undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century," (ctd.in "laurence sterne", The Guardian) too bears testament to its overwhelming significance for 20 th literature. furthermore, the influence of sterne's novel continues to be felt in some of the dominant contemporary cultural art forms: it has been successfully adapted by michael winterbottom as A Cock and Bull Story (2005), a film about the making of a film adaptation of Tristram Shandy, and martin rowson's major graphic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman was published to critical acclaim in 1996. within sterne studies, too, new editions of Tristram Shandy appear almost annually, and there continues to be an enormous outpouring of innovative critical work on sterne, and on his most famous work. since the turn of the millennium there have been numerous studies of sterne published: thomas keymer's