Tristram Shandy

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy. Sterne’s comic masterpiece is an extravagantly inventive work which was hugely popular when first published in 1759. Its often bawdy humour, and numerous digressions, are combined with bold literary experiment, such as a page printed entirely black to mark the death of one of the novel’s characters. Dr Johnson wrote that “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last” - but two hundred and fifty years after the book’s publication, Tristram Shandy remains one of the most influential and widely admired books of the eighteenth century.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Judith Hawley 13 episodes
  Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London
• John Mullan 14 episodes
  Professor of English at University College London
• Mary Newbould No other episodes
  Bowman Supervisor in English at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge

Reading list

• Tristram Shandy
  Max Byrd (HarperCollins, 1985) Google Books →
• Laurence Sterne: A Life
  Ian Campbell Ross (Oxford University Press, 2002) Google Books →
• Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years
  Arthur H. Cash (Routledge, 1992) Google Books →
• Laurence Sterne: The Later Years
  Arthur H. Cash (Routledge, 1993) Google Books →
• Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture
  Terry Eagleton (Cork University Press, 1998) Google Books →
• Sterne: The Critical Heritage
  Alan B. Howes (ed.) (Routledge, 2002) Google Books →
• Sterne, The Moderns and The Novel
  Thomas Keymer (Oxford University Press, 2003) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne
  Thomas Keymer (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2009) Google Books →
• Human, All Too Human
  Friedrich Nietzsche (1st published 1879, General Books LLC, 2012) Google Books →
• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
  Martin Rowson (Picador, 1996) Google Books →
• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
  Laurence Sterne (eds. Melvyn New and Joan New) (University Presses of Florida, 1984) Google Books →
• New Casebooks: Tristram Shandy
  Laurence Sterne (ed.) Melvyn New (Macmillan, 1992)

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Programme ID: b0418phf

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0418phf

Auto-category: 823.6 (English fiction–1700-1799)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. In 1760, a London periodical called The Monthly Review published a review of two books by an Anglican clergyman.