項耿傳 "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" By Laurence Sterne

Virginia Woolf on Laurence Sterne | OUPblog

For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies

Laurence Sterne, who penned the rude and anarchic "Tristram Shandy", died on this day in 1768. His influence ran deep, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to James Joyce

“To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.”
―from "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" ByLaurence Sterne

This ribald, high-spirited novel, whose author was described by Diderot as 'the Rabelais of the English', provoked literary scandal when it was first published on 1760. With its ingenious structure and its exuberant pretense of being an autobiography, TRISTAM SHANDY fascinates like a verbal game of chess. Milan Kundera has said that it is the eighteenth-century novel he loves best.