British · b. 1713
Laurence Sterne was an Anglo-Irish novelist and clergyman whose wildly experimental comic novel Tristram Shandy anticipated modernism by two centuries.
Laurence Sterne was a country clergyman who achieved sudden literary fame with one of the most innovative novels ever written.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) is a riotously digressive, self-conscious comic novel that plays with chronology, typography, and the very conventions of storytelling — including blank and marbled pages — anticipating the experiments of modernist and postmodern fiction. His later A Sentimental Journey was also widely admired.
Sterne is celebrated as a comic genius and a radical innovator, whose playful, boundary-breaking fiction influenced writers for centuries to come.
by Laurence Sterne
Tristram Shandy attempts to write his life story and cannot get past the moment of his conception. The novel is all digression — Uncle Toby's military obsessions, the Shandean theory of noses, blank pages, marbled pages, dedications to the reader — and is widely considered the most metafictional novel ever written, despite being the eighth-century novel.
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