Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne (1713–1768) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican clergyman whose experimental fiction includes Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey.

Tristram Shandy: Laurence Sterne’s novel, published in nine volumes from 1759 to 1767, disrupts chronology and conventional storytelling. This is Sterne’s best-known work and the fullest expression of his narrative play.
Unreliable narrator: A narrator whose account cannot be accepted as fully accurate or trustworthy. Tristram’s digressions and self-corrections make his account conspicuously fallible.
Eighteenth-century British literature: Literature produced in Britain during the eighteenth century, amid expanding print culture and changing forms of readership. Sterne’s novels emerged within this period’s lively literary marketplace.
Elizabeth Lumley Sterne: Elizabeth Lumley Sterne was Laurence Sterne’s wife. She shared Sterne’s life during his career as a clergyman and novelist.
Sentimentalism: Sentimentalism is an eighteenth-century literary and cultural movement that emphasizes feeling and sympathy. Sterne’s travel novel helped make sensibility a central subject of fiction.
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy: Laurence Sterne’s 1768 travel novel follows the emotional encounters of the clergyman Mr. Yorick. Sterne’s final novel shifts his comic experimentation toward travel and sensibility.
Typographical experimentation: The use of page layout, print marks, and unusual typography as expressive elements in writing. Sterne uses blank pages, marbled pages, and other visual devices as part of the fiction.
Rabelais: François Rabelais was a French Renaissance writer known for comic, expansive novels such as Gargantua and Pantagruel. Sterne’s digressive comedy drew on a tradition associated with Rabelais.
John Hall-Stevenson: John Hall-Stevenson was an English writer and landowner who was a friend of Laurence Sterne. Their friendship linked Sterne to a circle of literary and social companions.
Jane Austen: Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works include Pride and Prejudice and Emma. Austen’s fiction reflects on sentiment and sensibility in a later literary generation.

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The Life and Opinions of Tristram ShandyBroader topic: Sterne wrote the novel while serving as a parish clergyman in Yorkshire.