On Satire: 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman' by Laurence Sterne

'Tristram Shandy' was such a hit in its day that you could buy tea trays, watch cases and cushions decorated with its most famous characters and scenes. If much of the satire covered in this series so far has featured succinct and damning portrayals of recognisable city types, Sterne’s comic masterpiece seems to offer the opposite: a sprawling and irreducible depiction of idiosyncratic country-dwellers that makes a point of never making its point. Yet many of the familiar satirical tricks are there - from radical shifts in scale to the liberal use of innuendo - and in this episode Clare and Colin look at the ways in which the novel stays true to the traditions of satire while drawing on Cervantes, Rabelais, Locke and the fashionable notion of ‘sentiment’ to advance a new kind of nuanced social comedy.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Other episodes in the 'On Satire' series:
What is satire? • On Satire: What is sat...
John Donne's Satires: • On Satire: John Donne'...
Ben Jonson's 'Volpone': • On Satire: Ben Jonson'...
The Earl of Rochester: • On Satire: The Earl of...
John Gay's 'The Beggar's Opera': • On Satire: John Gay's ...
'The Dunciad' by Alexander Pope: • On Satire: 'The Duncia...
Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’ • 'Interest' and reading...
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ON SATIRE with Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell
HUMAN CONDITIONS with Adam Shatz, Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards
AMONG THE ANCIENTS II with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones
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MODERN-ISH POETS: SERIES 1 with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry
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This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadingsyt