«'Love is nothing without feeling. And feeling is still less without love.' Celebrated in its own day as the progenitor of 'a school of sentimental writers', «A Sentimental Journey» (1768) has outlasted its many imitators because of the humour and mischievous eroticism that inform Mr Yorick's travels. Setting out to journey to France and Italy he gets little further than Lyons but finds much to appreciate, in contrast to contemporary travel writers whom Sterne satirizes in the figures of Smelfungus and Mundungus. A master of ambiguity and double entendre, Sterne is nevertheless as concerned as his peers with exploring the nature of virtue; unlike other writers of sentimental fiction Sterne insists on the inseparability of desire and feeling. This new edition includes a selection from «The Sermons of Mr Yorick», which shed light on the concerns of the «Journey», «The Journal to Eliza», which records Sterne's feelings as he languishes for the company of Eliza Draper, and «A Political Romance», the satire on a local ecclesiastical squabble that was the catalyst for Sterne's literary career.»

A forerunner of psychological fiction, and considered a landmark work for its innovative use of narrative devices, Sterne's topsy-turvy novel was both celebrated and vilified when first published. Originally released in nine separate volumes, it is in effect an exercise about the difficulties of writing. Impossible to categorize, it remains a beguiling milestone in the history of literature.

«Laurence Sterne's «The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman» is a huge literary paradox, for it is both a novel and an anti-novel. As a comic novel replete with bawdy humour and generous sentiments, it introduces us to a vivid group of memorable characters, variously eccentric, farcical and endearing. As an anti-novel, it is a deliberately tantalising and exuberantly egoistic work, ostentatiously digressive, involving the reader in the labyrinthine creation of a purported autobiography. This mercurial eighteenth-century text thus anticipates modernism and postmodernism. Vibrant and bizarre, «Tristram Shandy» provides an unforgettable experience. We may see why Nietzsche termed Sterne 'the most liberated spirit of all time'.»