The Beautiful Oblique

More about the book

As Samuel Johnson noticed, there has always been something ‘odd’ about Tristram Shandy – a literary autobiography that begins with the narrator’s conception and ends before his birth. However, while time has been recognized as being central to the narrative strategies of Tristram Shandy , the role of time in the novel has rarely been examined in any substantive detail. This book offers the first extended consideration of the representation of time in Tristram Shandy . Its central argument is that the ‘oddness’ of the novel’s formal and typographical experimentation, fragmentation of narrative sequence, destabilization of the autobiographical subject and emphasis on textual materiality derives from a radical conception of temporality. In showing how Tristram Shandy conceives of temporality as an alterity that disrupts both subjectivity and representation, this study not only provides a theoretical commentary on the novel’s temporal experimentation, but also demonstrates the continuing importance of Tristram Shandy for the critical theory of fiction.