Samuel Johnson’s famous dismissal of Sterne’s "Tristram Shandy" (“Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.”) might well be one of the most short-sighted critical claims in literary history. In recent years, Sterne’s novel has been successfully adapted as a film and as a graphic novel and has been repeatedly cited as a major influence on Modernism and Postmodernism, a forerunner to the major metafictional texts of the Twentieth Century, and Calvino’s claim that "Tristram Shandy" is the “undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century,” offers an indication of the value in which it is held among many experimental fiction writers. This paper will present a case that it is precisely Tristram Shandy’s ‘oddness’ that has ensured its place in an alternative novelistic tradition in Europe, a tradition that finds ample correspondence with the non-realist tradition in the history of the Irish novel, a tradition that has formal and philosophical dissonance at its centre.
