Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy is one of the oddest comic novels in English literature. The Victorians were too morally earnest to see its meaning, while in our time critics have been too resolutely philosophical to grasp it. In contrast, Richard Lanham's introduction to Tristram Shandy combines clarity, wit, and grace. His account of the novel in terms of the simple pursuit of pleasure reveals historic and rhetorical models for the text while never straying from its playful spirit.