"With its typographical tricks, maddening digressions, and insistence on exposing its own artifice, Tristram Shandy seems closer to the fourth-wall–shattering metafictions of Borges or Nabokov, or to the stream-of-consciousness wanderings of Proust or Woolf herself, than to the more conventionally realist fictions of Sterne’s closest contemporaries.
But that raises a question: Just how did something so odd, so out of step with the norms of 18th-century fiction, appear in the first place? It’s easy to imagine Sterne as a lone weirdo tearing apart the rules of narrative art at the very moment his contemporaries were first perfecting them. But the truth is more complicated. Tristram Shandy wasn’t a unique avant-garde masterpiece awaiting the arrival of the 20th century to be appreciated. On the contrary, Sterne’s novel belonged to an already well-established tradition of “experimental” literature—a body of work every bit as formally adventurous as that of Sterne’s “modern” inheritors."