SOURCE: "The Revolt of Sterne," in Laurence Sterne: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by John Traugott, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968, pp. 90-107. Reprinted from A. A. Mendilow's Time and the Novel, Peter Nevill, Ltd., 1952. "Notes have been shortened or dropped without notice."

In the following essay, Mendilow asserts that with Tristram Shandy, Sterne modernized the novel format through his use of "time-shifts," or digressions, that more accurately approximate the way in which people think than does more usual linear narrative.

It was clearly high time to do again for the English novel what Furetiere and the other realists had done so effectively for the French: to flout the conventions of plotting, with its special and arbitrary requirements of the beginning, middle, and end; of the chronological sequence of action which denied artistic form altogether, of the principle of causality, which involved rigid selection and economy of incident in the...