Tristram Shandy: Introduction by Peter Conrad

This bawdy, high-spirited novel—whose author, Laurence Sterne, was described by Diderot as “the Rabelais of the English”—provoked a literary scandal when its first two volumes were published in 1759. A masterpiece of narrative absurdity, ribald humor, and philosophical playfulness, Tristram Shandy is famously studded with witty metafictional gambits—chapters out of order, blank and blacked-out pages, a preface that occurs in the middle of the book—that prefigured postmodernism by two centur...