/lit/ - Literature

But, so, let’s look at what Steven Moore claims to be the stream of spawn flowing forth from the narrative wealth of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

We begin at the very beginning, which is just after Sterne himself (this is not the proper way to begin ; one should begin at conception, back in Greece, Rome, China, India, Japan, etc, but that is what Moore’s Volume the First and much of Volume the Second were for) :: Voltaire’s Potpourri (1765), The Man with Forty Crowns (1768), and Lord Chesterfield’s Ears (1775) ; Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist and His Master ; Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage around My Room ; some novels from the German likes of Wieland, Nicolai, Hippel, Wezel, Richter ; and the American novelist High Henry Brackenridge.

So much for the 18th century. Lets’ continue into the 19th and 20th centuries using more or less Mr Moore’s words, because it is Mr Moore’s list and I am only reproducing it here because MORE PEOPLE NEED TO READ MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS KIND OF BOOK! You know, this kind of book tends to get BURIED. -- Also, one should read ALL of both of Moore’s novel-books because there are even MORE books found there that you’ve never heard of and with which you may find yourself IN LOVE.

BEGIN QUOTATION OF STEVEN MOORE (notice the quotation marks) ::

“Beginning in the 19th century, the trickle turned into a stream: the Shandy family genes can be detected in Charles Lucas’s Infernal Quixote (1801), Nicolai Wergeland’s Petty Incidents in the Life of Haldor Smek (1805-10), Washington Irving’s History of New York (1809), Ferenc Verseghy’s Merry Life and Ridiculous Opinions of Gergely Kolomposi Szarvas (1814-15), Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall (1815), Lord Byron’s verse-novel Don Juan (1818-23), which he called ‘a poetical T Shandy,’ E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (1820-22), several of American John Neal’s novels (Randolph, Errata, Authorship), Yakov de Sanglen’s Life and Opinions of a New Tristram (1825), Charles Nodier’s Story of the King of Bohemia and His Seven Castles (1830), 19-year-old Karl Marx’s Scorpion and Felix (1837, unfortunately incomplete), Robert Southey’s Doctor (1834-47), Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1836), Nicolai Gogol’s ‘Nose’ (1836; Pushkin called Gogol ‘the Russian Sterne’), Soren Kierkegaard’s Either-Or/Stages on Life’s Way diptych (1843-45), Almedia Garrett’s Travels in My Homeland (1846), Herman Melville’s Mardi (1849) and Moby-Dick (1851), Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865, 1871), Ippolito Nievo’s Castle of Fratta (1867), and earlier novels; Júlio Dinis’s English Family (1868), Carlo Dossi’s Life of Alberto Pisani (1870), Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881), and in Joaquim Machado de Assis’s later novels. By the end of the century, Sterne’s spawn could be found throughout continental Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia.”

in the top 10 of all books of all time

did anyone actually manage to read this odd book?