Obvious errors have been corrected, but most of the conventions of
eighteenth-century printing and all of Sterne's brilliant exploitations and
expansions of those conventions have been retained. Background information
includes a chronology of Sterne's life and comments from his letters pertaining
to the composition of the novel and to his theory of fiction. Responses by
Sterne's contemporaries among them Walpole, Goldsmith, Richardson, and Johnson
begin the selection of critical materials. Early-nineteenth-century assessments
by Coleridge, Hazlitt, Scott, and Thackeray are followed by twentieth-century
critical essays by Lodwick Hartley, D. W. Jefferson, Toby A. Olshin, Wayne
Booth, William Bowman Piper, Martin Price, Jean Jacques Mayoux, Richard A.
Lanham, Sigurd Burkhardt, J.