ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to demonstrate that Faustroll offers a fruitful comparison with Tristram Shandy both as a work of humorous, self-conscious literature and as a sustained reflection on questions including the relationship between scientific and imaginative discourse and the contingency of intellectual and artistic conventions. Stretching the conventional boundaries of the realist novel, both Tristram Shandy and Faustroll can be located within a tradition of eccentric, self-conscious, learned and usually humorous narratives often classified as metafictions, parodic novels or Menippean satires. In the form of Shandyism and Pataphysics, respectively, both Tristram Shandy and Faustroll have given rise to recognized philosophical standpoints whose influence can be identified beyond their source texts. In parallel with its associations with a specifically 'English' form of eccentric humour, Tristram Shandy influenced a number of currents in French literature in the interval between Sterne's career and Jarry's.
