Sterne and the “New Species of Writing”

Abstract Of the plurality of discourses and traditions that bump up against one another in Tristram Shandy, two have dominated critical attempts to make generic (and hence interpretative) sense of Sterne’s richly heteroglot text. One strain of criticism reads Tristram Shandy as a belated exercise in Renaissance learned wit; the other as a parody (or, if the implications of its parodic gestures are pursued, a deconstruction) of representational conventions in the modern novel. Each identity, all too often, is presented as exclusive of the other, and the critical dichotomy persists not least because its most evident point of stress—the overtly Cervantic aspect of Tristram Shandy—has been obscured by readings that present Cervantes himself as primarily an exponent of Erasmian satire, or of fideistic skepticism in the vein of Montaigne, rather than in his alternative guise as a proto-novelist.