"On the day of his wedding Conrad, heir to the house of Otranto, is killed in mysterious circumstances. Fearing the end of his dynasty, his father, Manfred, determines to marry Conrad's betrothed Isabella, until a series of supernatural events stands in his way. A giant helmet falls from the moon, a portrait sighs, a statue bleeds and spirits warn of impending tragedy, as the curse on Manfred's house inexorably works itself out."--Jacket.

Presents the eighteenth-century comic novel in which Tristram Shandy, the narrator, attempts to tell the story of his life but becomes totally bogged down in tales of his eccentric family. Doomed to become the 'sport of fortune' by an interruption at the crucial moment of conception, Tristram Shandy's life lurches from one mishap to another: his nose crushed by the doctor's forceps during birth, christened with the wrong name, an unfortunate incident...

""This may well be the most important study of the development of prose fiction in England since Ian Watt's classic Rise of the Novel , on which it builds." - Library Journal The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 , combines historical analysis and readings of extraordinarily diverse texts to reconceive the foundations of the dominant genre of the modern era. Now, on the fifteenth anniversary of its initial publication, The Origins of the English...

Discusses Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith, Henry MacKenzie, Frances Burney, Samuel Johnson, William Beckford, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Robert Bage, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, William Godwin, and Thomas Holcroft.