Peter Conrad
Shandyism: The Character of Romantic Irony.
Barnes & Noble,  1978. First Edition. 0064912671  190 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6" x 9", is bound in dark brown cloth, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Previous owner's name and address in the top outside corner of the front flyleaf. Book is otherwise in excellent condition.  Dust jacket displays light shelfwear.
"In the history of the novel, "Tristram Shandy" seems fated to remain in exile as a "sport." At best it has been granted the impudent, negative status of an "anti-novel," perpetually in opposition. Mr Conrad finds an alternative tradition for it by demonstrating its complicated and central significance to romantic culture. Sterne's novel, no longer exhibitionistically new, comes to seem genuinely  original and a source of originality in others; no longer freakishly marginal, it dominates a romantic tradition which extends over many literary forms and beyond literature into painting, architecture and music.
The book begins by establishing the connections of "Tristram Shandy" with the new romantic sense of tragicomic ambiguity in character and in literary form, and follows the novel's influence into the other arts, discussing the aesthetic theories of Hogarth, Fuseli and John Soane. It then reveals the novel's transformation into a sacred text of European romanticism, and records its recurrences down the length of the nineteenth century. For the first -- to which Jean Paul Richter, Heine, Schlegel, Schopenhauer and even the composer Mahler contribute -- is expounded and explored; and the quality of romantic irony, at once a spiritual vision and a technical skill, which critics so prized in "Tristram Shandy," is defined.