Thomas Carlyle
Sartor Resartus was a strange and new book when it was first published in 1833, and in many ways it remains a strange and new book today. The bulk of the novel takes the form of the a commentary on the life and works of the fictional Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a sort of renaissance-man German philosopher who develops a “Philosophy of Clothes.” The commentary is composed by a fictional English commentator, known only as the “Editor”;
...This unusual book is a must-read for fans of innovative fiction. More than a century before postmodernists like Nabokov and Barthes began to experiment with metafiction, Thomas Carlyle gave the world this playful sendup of German Idealism that purports to be a commentary on the work of fictional German philosopher Diogenes Teufelsdröckh's history of clothing.
