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A Sterne Telling Off (heh)

TOPIC: Significance of Authorship as suggested by The Clockmakers Outcry Against the Author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Tristram Shandy is a novel by Laurence Sterne. It was very popular and provocative in its time, with many individuals finding it excellent and others finding it offensive. One such work of ostensibly offended criticism was The Outcry.

Authorship of The Outcry

  • Purports to have been written by all the clockmakers
  • It almost certainly was not
    • Some stylistic evidence, bibliographic evidence
  • Proposals for who did author the text include Sterne himself (gasp)

Works Consulted:

Bandry, Anne. “Imitations of Tristram Shandy.” Critical Essays on Laurence Sterne, GK Hall, pp. 39–52. 1998

René, Bösch, and Piet Verhoeff. Labyrinth of Digressions: Tristram Shandy As Perceived and Influenced by Sterne’s Early Imitators. Rodopi, 2007.

Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. 1759-1767.

The Clockmakers Outcry Against the Author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. 1760. Unknown authors.

Parker, Jo Alyson. “The Clockmakers Outcry: Tristram Shandy and the Complexification of Time.” Disrupted Patterns: On Chaos and Order in the Enlightenment, pp. 147–60. Rodopi, 2000.

Rounce, Adam. "Authorship in the Eighteenth Century." Oxford Handbooks Online. March 04, 2015. Oxford University Press.

Griffin, Dustin. Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century, University of Delaware Press, 2013.

McCue, Jim. "The super-foetations of a rantipole brain." The Times Literary Supplement, no. 4598, 17 May 1991, p. 12. The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive, 1902-2014.

Joshua Senderling | Department of English, University of Maryland

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  • Raises questions regarding the nature of authorship both generally and in the eighteenth century
  • Explosion of readily available writing with continued expansion of printing
  • Anonymous authorship not uncommon around this time
  • This enabled The Outcry to function in its weird multi-faced capacity as a work of criticism, a parody of criticism, and an extension of Tristram Shandy itself
  • Makes authorship more of an ambiguous cloud than anything