Laurence Sterne has always been considered the least rule-bound of the British eighteenth-century novelists, and his Tristram Shandy is generally cited as the most eccentric production within the already varied collection of narrative types of eighteenth-century fiction. The common method of assimilating his work to the new province of novel writing is to assume that the digressions, apostrophes, typographical outrages and zany time scheme that make it so unaccountable are the result of a thoroughgoing parody of the conventions of realism established during the previous decade by Richardson and Fielding. Accordingly, when Sterne is not sporting with the immediacy encouraged by the epistolary novel by intimately addressing the reader, accumulating heaps of pointless minutiae, or confounding real time with narrative time, he is taking Fielding's modified neoclassicism to absurd conclusions by invoking the principle of selectivity to justify his missing chapters, or using that principle to authorize wild appeals to the reader about what to include and what to leave out, and by wickedly clever misapplications of the rule of ut pictura poesis (a poem should be like a speaking picture) in the shape of marbled and blackened pages, and waving lines intended to represent the flourish of a stick or the digressions of his story.'