English Language and Literature Commons^™

Reader As Author In Tristram Shandy, Nicholas Roberts

The Corinthian

In a letter dated June 1764, Laurence Sterne wrote to Elizabeth Montagu, "I am going down to write a world of Nonsense" (467). He was referring, of course, to Tristram Shandy, a popular sensation from the time the first two volumes appeared four years earlier. Despite Samuel Johnson's prediction that "nothing odd will do long" (qtd. in Sterne 484), Sterne's masterpiece has maintained its prominence, appearing in our own time as the most modem of the eighteenth-century novels. In this essay, I am concerned with Sterne's use of asterisks and blank pages-literary devices leaving gaps in the text-to engage …