The humour of Tristram Shandy has often been acknowledged, but it is not easy to find scholarly articles on Laurence Sterne which suggest that their authors laughed as they wrote. Nine authors have been invited to redress this in the year of the tercentenary of Sterne’s birth. This volume offers nine different facets of humour, a kaleidoscope which enables readers to recombine at will the genial, the bawdy, the sentimental, the ludicrous, the hobby-horsical, the philosophical, the irreverent, the incongruous and the facetious, sending the text spiralling out of the page.

Table of contents:

Preface
Suzy Halimi

Introduction
Anne Bandry-Scubbi and Peter de Voogd

Chapter One : Tristram Shandy as Comedy of Errors
Madeleine Descargues-Grant

Chapter Two :“Make them like unto a wheel”: Motion and Humour in Tristram Shandy
Anne Dromart

Chapter Three : A Book that Excites Laughter: The Physiology of Laughter in Tristram Shandy
Alexis Tadié

Chapter Four : A “New Order of Beings and Things”: Caricature in Sterne’s Fictional Worlds
M.-C. Newbould

Chapter Five : Asses, Artichokes and Macaroons: The Joco-Serious Humour of Tristram Shandy
Marc Martinez

Chapter Six : Sterne’s Comic Menagerie
Brigitte Friant-Kessler

Chapter Seven : “Into What a Delicious Riot of Things Am I Rushing?”: Material Things and Humour in Tristram Shandy
Paul Goring

Chapter Eight :  Tactus Interruptus as Sternean Trope
W.G. Day

Chapter Nine : Surfeits of words, Surviving lists in Tristram Shandy
Amélie Junqua

Bibliography
Contributors
Index