The life and opinions of Tristram Shandi, gentleman and the birth of the autobiographical metanovel

The article analyzez L. Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandi, Gentleman in comparison with Cervantes’ Don Quixote, on the one hand, and French comic novels of the 17 th century, on the other. For the first time, the place of the analyzed novel in the historical poetics of metanovel is defined (metanovel is a genre which is essentially two-dimensional: it does not only narrate about the characters’ life and its peripetia, but also defines itself and reflects upon itself as an aesthetic whole). It is stated that Tristram Shandi comprised a new epoch in the historical poetics of metanovel forming such a genre type in which the Author does not appear in the text as an extradiegetic narrator and is fully replaced by the hero in the function of the story narrator, while the hero is declared to be the sole and omnipotent “author” of the novel from its very beginning.