1790. Part Four of Eight. Containing Tristram Shandy and the Political Romance; Sentimental Journey with the Continuation; The Koran; Letters; Sermons; and with An Account of the Life and Writings of the Author. Sterne, English humorist, whose masterpiece Tristram Shandy was a popular success despite its being denounced on moral and literary grounds by Dr. Johnson, Horace Walpole, and others. His travels to the Continent resulted in the unfinished, A Sentimental Journey. He also published in his lifetime several volumes of sermons. One of the most entertaining and original literary works in English, Tristram Shandy is, in a sense, a parody of a novel. It is a hodgepodge of character sketches, blank pages, dramatic action, transposed chapters, and various digressions. Sterne constantly obtrudes himself into the novel and is by turns witty, satiric, sentimental, knowledgeable, and obscene. Beneath this apparent chaos, however, is a structure based on the association of ideas. In Tristram Shandy Sterne enlarged the scope of the novel from the mere recording of external incidents to the depiction of a complex of internal impressions, thoughts, and feelings. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.