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The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting and Tristram Shandy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2025
Critics have tended to downplay the connections between Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Jane Collier’s The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, but these two experimental, high-concept satires, with their shared Swiftian heritage, in fact have much in common. Both present – with different levels of irony – as systems of instruction, written to help people negotiate straightened social settings. The art of engineering small conversational triumphs is a common concern. The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting is a pure mock art, cut back to a sequence of instructive maxims. The pseudo-didactic component in Tristram Shandy is, by contrast, only one element in a patchwork of textual features. Both are burlesques of the conventions of early modern manuals and handbooks. They represent a retreat for the Enlightenment mock arts back into the realm of satirical fiction and print-format experimentation. They also mark a new level of subtlety in their treatment of the mock arts’ cognitive themes.
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