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
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman It is only in a Shandean spirit that my matter can be approached. I have to describe something as odd and whimsical as ever entered the brain of Sterne; and if I could, I would gladly lead you to the same affection for my father as you have for Tristram's. Christopher Morley, Editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, wrote a preface to the Limited Edition Club issue of Sterne's classic. That preface appears in Morley's book "Streamlines" published by Doubleday - Doran in 1932, and is titled "Tristram Shandy". In the Hermann Hesse novel "The Journey to the East",