Tristram Shandy
24 Apr, 2014
820 English and Old English literatures
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.
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)