ABSTRACT
In seeking to clarify the impact of Sterne's humour on later writings, one can hardly find a more suitable subject than Herman Melville's fiction. Attention to Melville's borrowings reveals influences both from Tristram Shandy and from Sterne's own sources, such as Rabelais and Burton. Moreover, Melville uses Shandean digression as his mode of 'progression' in The Con-Man, along with multiple points of view. Melville also wove in substantial borrowed material — along with briefer allusions, quotations, and sideswipes — from the learned tradition of Rabelais and Burton, and from Shakespeare to Swift, the Scriblerians, Sterne, and from Germany. Melville's immediate idea for The Con-Man came from newspaper accounts of a contemporary swindler, described as the original confidence man. Shandean humour and its methods find colourful expression in other Melville texts, such as Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno. Melville's ten sketches on the Galapagos Islands — The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles (1854) — also exemplify the humour and methods of Tristram Shandy.
