tristram shandy the life and opinions of tristram shandy gentleman

Toby never really got past the kindergarten girls-have-cooties phase. Toby's straight out of an eighties romcom and bending over backwards to be a sweetheart.

There was even a book called The Man of Feeling, written by Henry Mackenzie in 1771, about a guy who has all these qualities and then some. These new men were classic Sensitive Guy, although the word for it then was 'sentiment' or 'sensibility.' They were gentle, kind, respectful, and they sure weren't trying to get into your pants (or up your skirts)-or so they said. Toward the middle of the eighteenth century, though, a new model of masculinity started to catch on. They drank, they hunted, they screwed around, they told dirty jokes, they laughed at women, and they basically carried on like a bunch of bros. In the early eighteenth century, and for quite a while before that, men-especially the rich ones-were men. Hence Tristram Shandy’s open, digressive form offers both an alternative to the inevitable reductions of plot and a foil to the tyranny of the will to system.Toby is Tristram's uncle, Walter Shandy's brother, and a loveable doofus who loves his war toys. Just as the complexity of things is shown to be ill-explained by the systematic thinking beloved of Tristram’s father, Walter, so, the very structure of Tristram Shandy implies, linear, chronological narrative can’t do justice to what Sterne calls the ‘riddles and mysteries’ of existence. For all their comedy, the ‘pitiful misadventures’ of the novel’s ‘small HERO’ have an integrity and pathos of their own and Tristram’s inability to tell the story of his life without making ‘fifty deviations from a straight line’ is informed as much by a worldview as an unorthodox poetic of fiction. Tristram’s life and opinions stand in ironic contrast to the life-and-adventures formula of much mid-eighteenth-century fiction, but like the best anti-novels Sterne’s book is about much more than the debunking of literary clichés. Written before the novel came to be narrowly associated with verisimilitude and linear anecdote, Tristram Shandy’s restlessness with conventions points to the genre’s near-limitless possibilities. The Goldsmiths Prize launched in the tercentenary year of Sterne’s birth and the exuberantly inventive author of Tristram Shandy is one of its tutelary spirits. Tim Parnell – Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67)

Tristram shandy the life and opinions of tristram shandy gentleman