SOURCE: "New Worlds and Old Worlds: Tristram Shandy," in his Fictions of the Self: 1550-1800, Princeton University Press, 1981, pp. 214-32.

In the following excerpt, Weinstein demonstrates the originality of Tristram Shandy for its time, pointing out that the novel focuses on wordplay and innuendo rather than on plot and narrative coherence.

… I would submit that Tristram Shandy, in a manner that resembles Joyce's Ulysses, is built on and out of the fragments of crumbling traditions and institutions. In his fine essay on the tradition of learned wit in Tristram, D. W. Jefferson's essential conclusion is that "the theme of Tristram Shandy may be seen in terms of a comic clash between the world of learning and that of human affairs."¹ Comic though that clash is, I think that Sterne is depicting a cleavage, a gulf between the profuse materials of scholastic authority and learning which appear on every...