Laurence Sterne was, after Shakespeare, the second English writer to become a European cult figure. Where it took Shakespeare, however, nearly one and a half centuries to enter the canon of European literature, Sterne's success was instantaneous. His two main books, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) and A Sentimental Journey (1768) were available in other European languages only a few years after their English publication: the first German translation of Tristram Shandy began to appear in 1763 and the first French and the first Dutch translation in 1776; Johann Joachim Christoph Bode's celebrated translation of the Sentimental Journey, Yoricks empfindsame Reise, came out in the same year as the original and Joseph Pierre Frénais's Voyage sentimental the year after – the Italians had to wait a bit longer, before they got, after undistinguished translations from the French in 1792 and from the original in 1812, Ugo Foscolo's classic Viaggio Sentimentale in 1813.

The promotion of Sterne to the ranks of what Goethe was to call ‘Weltliteratur’ (world literature) actually coincided with that of Shakespeare, and this not only timewise but also in terms of aesthetic motivation. Sterne himself was very much aware of entering France in the footsteps of his great compatriot, who had, like him, mingled tears with laughter and broken all established rules, and he dramatizes this awareness in the ‘Passport’ episode of the Sentimental Journey, when he has his Yorick admitted to polite French society and given a French passport on the credit of his Shakespearean namesake (SJ 109– 10). In Germany as well the adoption of Shakespeare by the Romantic poets and thinkers was closely linked with a fervent passion for Sterne. They discovered not only, with Coleridge, ‘a smack of Hamlet’ in themselves, but just as much a smack of Sterne's Yorick and Tristram.

There seems to be a paradox at work here, one of the many paradoxes that riddle Sterne's work and its reception, as we shall see: Sterne's work, in spite of – or is it because of? – what appears to be the quintessential Englishness of its eccentricity and humour, its changeability rivalling the English weather, and the liberties it takes, proved to be more at home abroad than at home.