Laurence Sterne was an Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican cleric who wrote the novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, published sermons and memoirs, and indulged in local politics. He grew up in a military family, travelling mainly in Ireland but briefly in England. An uncle paid for Sterne to attend Hipperholme Grammar School in the West Riding of Yorkshire, as Sterne's father was ordered to Jamaica, where he died of malaria some years later. He attended Jesus College, Cambridge on a sizarship, gaining bachelor's and master's degrees. While Vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest, Yorkshire, he married Elizabeth Lumley in 1741. His ecclesiastical satire A Political Romance infuriated the church and was burnt.
The Anatomy of Melancholy is a book by Robert Burton, first published in 1621, but republished five more times over the next seventeen years with massive alterations and expansions.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1759.
Antoine Furetière was a French scholar, writer, and lexicographer, known best for his satirical novel Scarron's City Romance. He was expelled from the Académie Française for seeking to publish his own French language dictionary.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, also known as Tristram Shandy, is a novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others following over the next seven years. It purports to be a biography of the eponymous character. Its style is marked by digression, double entendre, and graphic devices. The first edition was printed by Ann Ward on Coney Street, York.
Digression is a section of a composition or speech that marks a temporary shift of subject; the digression ends when the writer or speaker returns to the main topic. Digressions can be used intentionally as a stylistic or rhetorical device.
Richard Sterne was a Church of England priest, Archbishop of York from 1664 to 1683.
William Combe was a British miscellaneous writer. His early life was that of an adventurer, his later was passed chiefly within the "rules" of the King's Bench Prison. He is chiefly remembered as the author of The Three Tours of Doctor Syntax, a comic poem, illustrated by artist Thomas Rowlandson's colour plates, that satirised William Gilpin. Combe also wrote a series of imaginary letters, supposed to have been written by the second, or "wicked" Lord Lyttelton. Of a similar kind were his letters between Swift and "Stella". He also wrote the letterpress for various illustrated books, and was a general hack.
Ab ovo is Latin for "from the beginning, the origin, the egg". The term is a reference to one of the twin eggs from which Helen of Troy was born. The eggs were laid by Leda after Zeus, disguised as a swan, either seduced and mated with or raped her, according to different versions. Had Leda not laid the egg, Helen would not have been born, so Paris could not have eloped with her, so there would have been no Trojan War.
Richard Mead, FRS, FRCP, was an English physician. His work, A Short Discourse concerning Pestilential Contagion, and the Method to be used to prevent it (1720), was of historic importance in the understanding of transmissible diseases.
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy is a novel by Laurence Sterne, written and first published in 1768, as Sterne was facing death. In 1765, Sterne travelled through France and Italy as far south as Naples, and after returning determined to describe his travels from a sentimental point of view. The novel can be seen as an epilogue to the possibly unfinished work The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and also as an answer to Tobias Smollett's decidedly unsentimental Travels Through France and Italy. Sterne had met Smollett during his travels in Europe, and strongly objected to his spleen, acerbity and quarrelsomeness. He modelled the character of Smelfungus on him.
An antinovel is any experimental work of fiction that avoids the familiar conventions of the novel, and instead establishes its own conventions.
Johann Joachim Christoph Bode was a well-known German translator of literary works.
Tristram Shandy is an unfinished opera project by Michael Nyman based on his favorite novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne, begun in 1981. The project has been perpetually on hold for want of a commission, but at least five excerpts of the opera have been performed publicly, and one has been released on a commercial recording.
The Kiss and Other Movements is the sixth album release by Michael Nyman, and the fifth recording with the Michael Nyman Band. The title track is an "operatic duet" between Dagmar Krause and Omar Ebrahim, based on a painting of the same title by Paul Richards, which is depicted on the cover, and used in a video art project by Richards of the same name. The album includes music from Peter Greenaway's Making a Splash and 26 Bathrooms, an excerpt of Nyman's unfinished opera, Tristram Shandy, and a concert piece, "Tango Between the Lines".
The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper is a complex satirical novel by Prussian Romantic-era author E. T. A. Hoffmann. It was first published in 1819–1821 as Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern, in two volumes. A planned third volume was never completed.
John Hall-Stevenson, in his youth known as John Hall, was an English country gentleman and writer.
Luis del Alcázar (1554–1613) was a Spanish Jesuit theologian.
Gian Carlo Passeroni was an Italian satirical poet, the most important of the 18th-century Nice poets. He was an ordained priest and for much of his career lived an ascetic life in Milan. He is best known for his lengthy satirical poem II Cicerone.
The Caxtons: A Family Picture is an 1849 Victorian novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton that was popular in its time.
