Augustan prose other novelists should be mentioned, for they, like Fielding and Richardson, were in dialog through their works. Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett held a personal dislike for one another, and their works similarly offered up oppositional views of the self in society and the method of the novel. Laurence Sterne was a clergyman, and he consciously set out to imitate Jonathan Swift with his "Tristram Shandy" (1759–1767). "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman" was a stylistic and formal revolution for the novel. Like Swift's satires, it begins with radical skepticism and a willingness to break apart figurative language
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman even approached his publisher F.A. Brockhaus offering to translate it into German (an offer which Brockhaus rejected). Samuel Johnson in 1776 commented, "Nothing odd will do long. "Tristram Shandy" did not last." Schopenhauer privately rebutted Samuel Johnson, saying: "The man Sterne is worth 1,000 Pedants and commonplace-fellows like Dr.J." The young Karl Marx was a devotee of "Tristram Shandy", and wrote a still-unpublished short humorous novel, "Scorpion and Felix", that was obviously influenced by Sterne's work. Goethe praised Sterne in "Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years", which in turn influenced Nietzsche. "Tristram Shandy" has also been seen by formalists and other literary