First published in 1986, Laurence Sterne follows Sterne’s life and career from the moment of recognition brought by the successful publication of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, to the publication in 1768 of A Sentimental Journey and its author’s death three weeks later. Sterne, a consumptive who knew that he would meet an early death, was determined to pack into his life all the writing, adventure and play he could, believing implicitly ‘that every time a man smiles, -- but much more so, when he laughs, that it adds something to this Fragment of Life.’ We see him in his study at Shandy Hall, among the philosophes in Paris, with his family at Toulouse and Montpellier, preaching before the villagers of Coxworld or before the duke of York, and entertaining the bluestockings, the intellectuals, the wits and rakes of 18th century London. We witness Sterne’s struggle, after sailing through the early volumes of Tristram Shandy, to find ways to continue or complete the novel. We watch the disintegration of any meaningful relationship with his wife, his secret amours, his public sentimental flirtations and his hopeless passion for Eliza Draper. This book will be of interest to students of literature, literary history as well as to any casual reader of Sterne’s novels.

Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy is the most wayward -- and in some respects the most powerful -- critique of Locke's theory of knowledge, while his interest in the gulf between biological and clock time makes him a contemporary of Proust and Bergson. In obscuring the fine line between autobiography and fiction, Sterne belongs to the generation of modern writers that includes Joyce and Nabokov. In his deliberate refusal to construct a 'goahead plot' Sterne commends himself to contemporary narratologists. In his concern with personal identity, he anticipates the Derridean stress on 'trace'. In his promiscuous borrowings from past authors, he offers himself as a suitably perverse model for the school of postmodern theory. In his attention to matters of typography and to a visual language, he provides a running commentary on almost every aspect of the relationship between word and image. Himself influenced by Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes and Burton, Sterne has influenced writers as diverse as Cabrera Infante, Kundera, Márquez, Rushdie and Beckett. And James Joyce. These influences are traced here by sixteen scholars from Europe and the USA, proof if any were needed that Laurence Sterne today is as rewardingly puzzling as he was in his own century.