The interjection of a new and dynamically different reading of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is imperative, if scholars want to clearly see many of the hidden facets of the novel that have gone unexamined because of out-dated scholarship. Ian Watt’s assumption that Sterne “would probably have been the supreme figure among eighteenth-century novelists” (291) if he had not tried to be so odd, and the conclusion that he draws, that “Tristram Shandy is not so much a novel as a parody of a novel” (291), is incorrect. Throughout the thesis, I argue that Sterne was not burlesquing other novelists, but instead, was engaging with themes that are now being examined by postmodern theories of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean François Lyotard: themes like the impenetrability of identity (“Don’t puzzle me” (TS 7.33.633)), the insufficiency of language (“Well might Locke write a chapter upon the imperfections of words” (5.6.429)), and the unavailability of permanence (“Time wastes too fast” (9.8.754)). I actively engage with their theories to deconstruct unexamined themes inside Tristram Shandy, and illuminate postmodern elements inside the novel. However, I do not argue that Tristram Shandy is postmodern. Instead, I argue that if the reader examines the novel outside of its usual context inside the eighteenth-century novel, there are themes that are apparent in the narrative which have gone unexamined because of the way it has been classified inside academia, and that postmodernist theory allows for these themes to be re-examined in the postmodern culture in which we now reside.

Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is a novel consumed with conversation. The conversations that the characters have with each other and the ongoing conversation between Tristram and the reader all address the importance of communication. This study examines the theme of communication as Sterne presents it in his novel. The first chapter explores the personalities of Walter and Toby Shandy with the assumption that an understanding of their eccentricities will illustrate the reasons for the difficulties they encounter when trying to communicate with others. The relationships between the sexes are the subject for the second chapter. Sterne recognized the opportunity that the barrier of gender afforded him in the development of his theme, and he utilizes these relationships to illustrate the consequences of miscommunication. The final chapter focuses on Tristram’s role as the narrator. His personality and conversations with the reader also speak to the role of communication in the novel.

This project explores the effect eighteenth century reproductive theory had on Laurence Sterne�s use of satire in <i>The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman</i> (1759 - 1767). Particular focus will be on the impact of the paternal and maternal imagination on the developing fetus, sexual facts and misconceptions common to eighteenth-century readers, as well as the changes in the gender dynamic of the birthing process (the man-midwife debate). There has been a lack of critical attention specifically on Tristram Shandy and its textual debt to medical treatises, midwifery texts, and folkloric medical tracts. Beyond this, I believe that the visual images also published in these works to be of great value in understanding the socio-historic background to sex and reproduction in the eighteenth century. I propose that the reader should look beyond the child-like antics of Walter and instead focus on Elizabeth as patient and Tristram as �experiment� within the historical-medical context of their contemporary culture. By expanding the context of relevant cultural materials that would have been available to Sterne, it is possible to read certain portions of the novel as a timeline of pregnancy through conception, gestation, and ultimately birth. I wish to examine the physical development not only of Tristram the character but also Tristram the novel, as the parallels between its creation and birth are obvious to even the most casual reader. Images of the autonomous fetus were quite well disseminated at this time and could be used to understand Tristram as a pseudo-fetal narrator, an author trapped somewhere in between a self-reliant free embryo writing and a grown man imprisoned by the calamities that befell him in-utero.

The usefulness of a detailed examination of the fictional world of a novel is demonstrated in a study of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.Analysis of the fictional world of Tristram Shandy, reveals a binary world which is created by the novel's narrative technique. Distinct outlines of the two fictional worlds of Tristram (TW) and the Shandy Brothers (SBW) can be established, and-the examination of these worlds provides new insights for explicating the structure, coherence, unity, and completeness of Sterne's novel.The duality of fictional worlds in the novel is not merely the reflection of movement between the two time frames of Tristram's present and his past. There are distinguishing differences not only of time, characters, and events, but also of place and quality of experience. As one views these worlds alternately but consistently throughout the novel, the bifocal perspective which emerges creates the depth perception necessary not only to see Tristram as he is, but also to comprehend a composite universe in which the attitudes, conflicts, and complications of the present world of Tristramn both mirror and complement those of the world of the Shandy family.Just as the juxtaposition of two fictional worlds augments the reader's perception of Tristram's character, life, and opinions, so also does it alter significantly the perception of the book he is writing. For it is by means of Tristram's narrative stance, his self-conscious role as author busily attempting to chronicle the events occurring in both worlds, and the perspective created by his dual narration of these events, that the reader comes to see and appreciate his book as an artifact watched in the process of its creation. As the artifact which Tristram is struggling to create, the book itself assumes a fictional role as an object in Tristram's world.In the process of his virtuoso performance in entertaining the reader while failing in the attempt to complete his autobiography, Tristram unwittingly succeeds in disclosing in his present world as much of his spirit and character as a reader requires in order to know him well. The ultimate success, of course, is that of Sterne, who has created a remarkably involuted, complex, and transparent structure of fiction by means of (1) Tristram's intrusive and digressive narration, in which the two fictional worlds emerge simultaneously; (2) the plot of Tristram attempting to write his Life; and (3) the unfolding character of Tristram. Taken together these elements interact and combine to produce a novel which is artful, ingenious, and a structure of paradox and irony.

Basically, a study of the structure of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy involves an analysis of the point of view of both the author and the narrator, and hence of variations on the first-person narration that are found in this novel. Tristram Shandy is related wholly in the authorial and historical present, and the reader as well as the fictional characters is included in the narrator's discourses of Tristram's own world. Hence, one must apply a considerable degree of critical objectivity when examining the narrator's role in the novel. A second problem is the importance of the fictional world that Tristram is ostensibly concerned with – that is, his birth and upbringing within the social environment of Shandy Hall, because the process of Tristram's narration proceeds to usurp most of the novel, shouldering out events at Shandy Hall, which are left half-introduced, or unfinished, or barely hinted at, and we are left with a fairly complete portrait of Tristram Shandy, but not of his life at Shandy Hall. A third problem is that of the inherent structure of the novel, which necessarily is centered around the dominant, controlling voice of the narrator. Although this structures has been dismissed as chaotic or irregular or formless, it does possess definite patterns which allow for the addition of further units. As Tristram Shandy is basically an open-ended novel allowing for infinite expansion, its chronology and subject matter are designed to cohere only in terms of Tristram's entire life; thus we find the events and characters are remembered in the authorial present. The novel moves back and forth on different levels of the historical present, and besides setting out an accumulative amount of remembered biographical detail, presents a projected picture of the mind of an individual in the process of remembering and narrating. A close study of the associational links between chapters clearly reveals the above points, for significantly, these links are all easy to follow and accumulative in effect. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate how the structure of the novel proceeds from the dominant single point of view that Tristram represents, how the ostensible autobiographical subject matter is eventually subjugated to this personality in operation, and how the structure of the novel functions efficiently towards this end. Chapter I examines the Tristram persona and Chapter II the Yorick persona, in order to determine how they function in this first-persom narration, and to what combined effect. Chapter III on Shandy Hall examines the characters of the novel, exclusive of Tristram, with a view to motivational factors that may proceed from them and that impinge on his story. And Chapter IV examines the associational and chronological structure of the novel in terms of the actual patterns and linkages Sterne provided his segmentalized novel with, and draws a general conclusion from this study. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Being classified in the ¡§anti-tradition of unclassifiable books,¡¨ Laurence Sterne¡¦s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. has fascinated generations of readers and critics with its seemingly chaotic richness. The narrator Tristram appears to hide his ultimate purpose and unity beneath a cloak of oddity and confusion, which defies any attempt on the reader¡¦s part to ever pinning it down, and thus opens ground for various debates and critiques. Taking Tristram¡¦s many futile efforts at tracing back the origin of his life as the starting point, this thesis attempts to explore the author-narrator¡¦s deliberate use of oddity and confusion. The impossibility of ever finding a coherent and definite beginning of one¡¦s life is read in my study as a metaphor of one¡¦s losing battle at pinning down the concept of self, the embodiment of the ungraspable subjectivity. Not even Locke¡¦s epistemology or the eighteenth-century knowledge of anthropology can serve as an adequate framework of reference for the account of one¡¦s life, if it is to be interpreted as subjectivity. The fact that men are different from one another arises from their individual hobbyhorse, the manifestation of subjectivity, which resists attempts to be defined exactly and thus makes itself unfathomable. This discovery is the very basis of my reading of Tristram Shandy. Since subjectivity refuses to be grasped, my thesis then proceeds to investigate the way in which Tristram represents this ungraspable subjectivity. The concept of staging is employed in this thesis to explore Sterne¡¦s deployment of subjectivity. On the stage where the many facets of each character¡¦s singular microcosm are presented, it is demonstrated that the reader is also drawn into Tristram¡¦s game play, only with the peculiar result that in discovering subjectivity (theirs and ours,) we trespass boundary and assume Tristram¡¦s subjectivity.

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Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, has been noted as an unconventional eighteenth-century novel and it has long been considered unadaptable and unfilmable. In the last decade, however, two popular adaptations of Tristram Shandy have appeared in new media forms: Martin Rowson’s 1996 graphic novel and Michael Winterbottom’s 2005 film. Since Sterne’s text denies the kind of transfer typical of literary adaptations, Rowson and Winterbottom adapt the conceptual elements. Through adaptation and media theory, this thesis defines the Shandean elements of Sterne’s novel and locates the qualities of the text retained in adaptation. Rowson and Winterbottom adapt the conceptual properties of Tristram Shandy, ‘the spirit of the text,’ into two distinct mediums. In an exploration of the conventions of each medium, this thesis argues that the adaptations of Tristram Shandy are true to its spirit, and both successfully adapt the unadaptable novel.

The eighteenth-century British novel derived its purpose, structure, and theory of characterization from the life-history, in the form of biography or autobiography. In eighteenth-century Britain both the novel and the life-history emerged in recognizably modern forms. Like the life-history, the novel maintained as its purpose the Horatian maxim that art should both instruct and entertain. Moreover, the novel and the life-history shared the same structure, as each novel purported to be the biography or autobiography of the title character of the work. Finally, the novel and the life-history adopted the same theories of characterization for the major as well as minor characters within the works.However, life-writing was at this time in a period of transition from the static to the dynamic theory of characterization. This transition came as a result of a significant change in the view of the source of personality. In the static life-history the central subject, as well as the minor figures, possessed an innate, unchanging personality. Thus when Plutarch wrote of Alexander or of Julius Caesar, these figures were depicted as men born to greatness. However, each was imperfect, possessing in the Aristotelian sense a tragic flaw. In the main this theory was significant because it placed no value on what was later to be considered so important in the development of personality-the individual's experiential life.In direct contrast to the static theory, the dynamic view of personality was the result of Cartesian and Lockean psychology which saw personality as the direct result of not the innate but instead the experiential processes. The experiences of the central character, rather than exemplifying innate qualities, now were seen as shaping and delineating that personality. The application of this new theory to both the modern novel and life-history produced a central character or characters growing according to the dynamic theory, though the minor characters remained "type" characters in accordance with the static theory.Therefore, the sources of the British eighteenth-century novel lay both in the dynamic biographies and autobiographies of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century and in the classical life-writers beginning with Plutarch and Josephus, as well. In this study the primary classical works analyzed are Josephus, the portrait of Herod in the Jewish Antiquities and his own in The Life; Plutarch's "Julius Caesar" and Suetonius' "Julius Caesar"; St. Augustine's Confessions; Dante's Vita Nuova; and the transitional Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. The adoption of the new dynamic theory is illustrated in two life-histories: Colley Cibber's Apology and Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage.The application of the dynamic theory to eighteenth-century autobiographical novels is exemplified by Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Tobias G. Smollett's Roderick Random. Though there was a complex psychological portrait of Richardson's Pamela Andrews, with a number of moral digressions, there were little character development and few digressions in Smollett's novel.A far more complex treatment of the theories of personality occurred in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. As narrator Tristram centered the work upon the four.crucial accidents that had formed his personality, and on those other three dynamic characters who were connected with these misfortunes--the Shandy brothers and Parson Yorick. In contrast, minor characters such as Dr. Slop were drawn according to the static theory. The digressions within the work were encased within a comic-satiric framework. Thus the two theories of personality--static and dynamic--which informed eighteenth-century life-writing served also as the principal source for characterization in the eighteenth-century British autobiographical novel.

This thesis considers Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy in light of Friedrich Schlegel's concept of irony. Departing from previous criticism, which focuses on Sterne's playful narrative techniques, the discussion here elucidates other ways in which Tristram Shandy exemplifies the kind of irony Schlegel theorizes. These ways include: Sterne's "Mischgedicht" method, which amalgamates in a single work many types of style, or diverse permutations of form and content; the depiction of Parson Yorick, who epitomizes Socratic irony as Schlegel defines it in the 108th Lyceum fragment; Sterne's gentle satirizing of systematic thinkers, including his own narrator, Tristram; and Sterne's attitude toward words, knowledge, and reading. At the end of chapter 5, Sterne's irony is unraveled and reconstructed. This disentangling leads to a proposed refutation of recent interpretation of both Sterne and Schlegel. These studies see Sterne and Schlegel's irony as implying lack or flux of meaning. It is the strong contention of the following thesis that an essential aspect of Sterne and Schlegel's shared ironic world view is the continual, optimistic attempt to understand life, which necessarily presupposes a sincere and profound belief in both meaning and the reliable conveyance of it. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)