Question

Essay on the life and opinions of tristram shandy

Answer 1

In A Nutshell

Tristram Shandy is a soap opera about penises—big penises, small penises, working penises, broken penises, wounded penises, real penises, symbolic penises, and… you get the point.

Where does the soap opera come in, you might ask? Tristram Shandy's got all the drama of Days of Our Lives —think marriage, misunderstandings, mistakes and misnamings. Basically, it covers everything but Tristram's life: his father's philosophical opinions, his mother's obsession with giving birth in London, his parson's ability to make everyone mad, his uncle's mania for toy forts, and, more than anything else, how stinkin' hard it is to write this book.

Tristram Shandy might be soapy, but it's also got substance. Shmoopers, you're checking out one of the Top 40 Hits of the 18th century. And this duckling doesn't look like any of the others: not Samuel Richardson, who wrote long, detailed novels about girls being raped; not Daniel Defoe, who wrote biographical novels about sailors and prostitutes; not Henry Fielding, who wrote funny parodies of Richardson. Nope, Tristram Shandy self-consciously makes fun of all these conventions while being pretty entertaining in its own right.

There are two ways to make sense of this:

(1) Tristram Shandy is a postmodern classic. The 19th century is famous for producing big door-stopper novels full of complex plots and characters. At the end of the century, some writers started to get bored with realism, the idea that novels were supposed to represent "real life" accurately. They started writing novels that played with the idea that a book could have anything to do with real life. Voilà, you have modernism.

A few decades later, other writers started to question the ideal of modernism. Technologies like TV, radio, and movies made "real life" start to seem a lot less real. They used techniques like pastiche (collage), stream-of-consciousness, and self-reflexivity to question not just "real life" but the whole idea of writing. That's postmodernism in a nutshell. If you've read a piece of contemporary literary fiction—the kind of book that wins prizes—and closed it thinking, "What the heck?" then you've probably read a postmodern book.

Plenty of people will claim that Tristram Shandy was postmodern before there was any modernism to be post about. Okay, we'll bite. The book is self-reflexive (it thinks about itself), narrator-Tristram produces multiple versions of himself, there's no climax and no resolution, and the characters are caricatures rather than complex, rounded people. David Foster Wallaceor any other postmodern writer would be darn tootin' proud.

(2) On the other hand, maybe Tristram Shandy is not forward-looking but backward-looking. The 17th and early-18th centuries (and even farther back) had a tradition of something called learned wit. Basically, learned wit consisted of really smart people making smart jokes for other smart people. (A good example of today's learned wit might be cartoons in The New Yorker.) Some scholars say that Tristram Shandy is one of the last examples of learned wit. It's not supposed to be a novel; it's a clever parody of novels that's more interested in responding to the philosopher John Locke than in telling a story.

Which is it?

If you asked Tristram, he'd probably ask right back: "Why does it matter?"

 mark me as brainlist please

Answer 2

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The first fully emergence of English novel was in the eighteenth century. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), and Henry Fielding (1707-1754) have always been regarded as pioneers in the rise of English novel. Appealing to the middle class, these novels are the direct product of middle class’s ideals, assumptions, and values. One of the shared themes among the eighteenth century novelists is the reformation in the manners of the age. Seeking to improve the morals of the age, they aimed for presenting models of virtue. Amrollah Abjadian declares that Defoe’s works primarily depict “the world of romance and the realm of distant adventures.” (169). Furthermore, considering the works of Richardson, Abjadian states that Richardson’s novels tend to be more of a “moral preaching” which are the presentation of human problems and moral conflicts in society. Moreover, Henry Fielding’s novels predominantly concentrate on the “solid actuality of English life as most people of his age experienced” (169). Although these writers are regarded as the dominant novelists of the age, the most original author of the age of Johnson is perhaps Laurence Sterne.