This edition of "the most modern of eighteenth-century novels" reprints the text of the first edition of the volumes of Tristram Shandy as they appeared from December 1759 to January 1767, including the two illustrations by Hogarth. Obvious errors have been corrected, but most of the conventions of eighteenth-century printing, and all of Sterne's brilliant exploitations and expansions of these conventions, have been retained. "Backgrounds" are provided by a chronology of Sterne's life and comments from his letters pertaining to the composition of the novel and his theory of fiction. Responses by Sterne's con-temporaries-among them Walpole, Goldsmith, Richardson, and Johnson—begin the selection of critical materials. Early-nineteenth-century assessments by Coleridge, Hazlitt, Scott, and Thackeray are followed by twentieth-century critical essays by Lodwick Hartley, D. W. Jefferson, Toby A. Olshin, Wayne Booth, William Bowman Piper, Martin Price, Jean-Jacques Mayoux, Richard A. Lanham, Sigurd Burkhardt, J. Paul Hunter, Charles Parish, and Howard Anderson.
