A comprehensive volume of international research on the European reception of Laurence Sterne.

Three dream sequences from Laurence Sterne and Jean Paul.

A study on the influence which the German novelist Jean Paul Friedrich Richter had upon Robert Schumann's music.

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.'

This Companion provides essays on the author of Tristram Shandy, his eighteenth-century context, his oeuvre and its reception.

Thomas Keymer's introduction to this Casebook examines the historical context and controversial reception of Tristram Shandy, and connects the essays selected for inclusion to the diverse traditions of Sterne criticism.