Romanticism Goethe and the young Walter Scott. Both Chatterton and Macpherson's work involved elements of fraud, as what they claimed was earlier literature that they had discovered or compiled was, in fact, entirely their own work. The Gothic novel, beginning with Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" (1764), was an important precursor of one strain of Romanticism, with a delight in horror and threat, and exotic picturesque settings, matched in Walpole's case by his role in the early revival of Gothic architecture. "Tristram Shandy", a novel by Laurence Sterne (1759–67) introduced a whimsical version of the anti-rational sentimental novel to the
Laurence Sterne Foster Wallace. Italo Calvino referred to "Tristram Shandy" as the "undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century". The Russian Formalist writer Viktor Shklovsky regarded "Tristram Shandy" as the archetypal, quintessential novel, of which all other novels are mere subsets: ""Tristram Shandy" is the most typical novel of world literature." However, the leading critical opinions of "Tristram Shandy" tend to be markedly polarised in their evaluations of its significance. Since the 1950s, following the lead of DW Jefferson, there are those who argue that, whatever its legacy of influence may be, "Tristram Shandy" in its original context actually represents