Tristram Shandy provoked a literary sensation when it first appeared in a series of installments between 1759 and 1767. The ribald, high-spirited book prompted Diderot to hail Sterne as 'the English Rabelais.' An ingeniously structured novel (about writing a novel) that fascinates like a verbal game of chess, Tristram Shandy is both a joyful celebration of the infinite possibilities of the art of fiction and a wry demonstration of its limitations. Many view this picaresque masterpiece as the precursor of the modern novel. A Sentimental Journey, which came out in 1768, begins as a travelogue. Yet it ends as a treasury of portraits, sketches, and philosophical musings, for as Virginia Woolf observed: 'A Sentimental Journey, for all its levity and wit, is based upon something fundamentally philosophic--the philosophy of pleasure.'

Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy continues to be as widely read and admired as upon its first appearance. Deemed more accessible than Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and often assigned as a college text, A Sentimental Journey has received its share of critical attention, but—unlike Tristram Shandy—to date it has not been the subject of a dedicated anthology of critical essays. This volume fills that gap with fresh perspectives on Sterne’s novel that will appeal to students and critics alike. Together with an introduction that situates each essay within A Sentimental Journey’s reception history, and a tailpiece detailing the culmination of Sterne’s career and his death, this volume presents a cohesive approach to this significant text that is simultaneously grounded and revelatory.

Laurence Sterne was in his mid-forties when the publication of Tristram Shandy catapulted him from obscurity into unprecedented literary fame. The story of how a provincial clergyman became the most fashionable writer of his day is extraordinary, and all the more remarkable for having beenengineered by its subject. 'I wrote not to be fed, but to be famous', Laurence Sterne declared of his comic masterpiece, and in order to achieve his ambition he became an assiduous networker, as astute a self-publicist as any modern author could hope to be. Shocked critics of Tristram Shandydenounced his bawdy novel as a scandal to the cloth but Sterne revelled in the celebrity his age's obsession with novelty and fashion allowed him. He at last found compensation for a life characterized by alternating moods of gaiety and gloom. Unhappily married to a woman who suffered a nervousbreakdown and at one time believed herself to be the Queen of Bohemia, Sterne became notorious for his sexual and sentimental liaisons with other women. His second book, A Sentimental Journey, transmuted his experiences into literary expressions of moral feeling. Dependent for so much of his life on patrons, it was the patronage of the reading public that was to secure his livelihood. Tristram Shandy remains one of the most innovative and influential novels in world literature, and Ian Campbell Ross makes full use of important new materials to examineSterne's life and career and the cult of the celebrity author.