Shandyean Satire and the rhetorical arts in eighteenth-century England

Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy provides historians of rhetoric with an alternative approach to assessing eighteenth-century theory and practice. This essay examines within the novel two representative orientations as indices of popular attitudes about the art during the early modern era. This interpretation argues that, as a satire on rhetorical pretensions and excess, Tristram Shandy can be considered an important document in the venerable battle between the ancients and the moderns.