Carlyle's powerful, enigmatic masterpiece of fiction
Sartor Resartus, which first appeared in 1833-4, has long been recognized as a work of the foremost literary historical importance. It marks the transition from the Romantic to the Victorian periods; its influence on the great mid-nineteenth-century flowering of American literature is incalculable.
Sartor Resartus ('The Tailor Reltailored') can best be appreciated as a self-conscious, reflexive fiction, in the tradition of A Tale of a Tub and Tristram Shandy; its successors include Moby-Dick and Ulysses. Ostensibly an introduction, for English readers, to a strange history of clothing by the German Professor of Things in General, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, Sartor Resartus is concerned with social injustice, with the right way of living in the world, and with the largest questions of faith and understanding.
