"When Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1757-67) exploded on to the literary marketplace, responses to the novel were dominated by its visual and typographic features, and they continue to colour the reception of Sterne's wider corpus. Yet Sterne's experiments with the visual appearance of the novel, such as the celebrated black and marbled pages, are rarely today considered within the context of wider developments in the design and production of the eighteenth-century book. This study challenges approaches to Sterne's works which treat his visual devices as supporting matter through a print history methodology which traces each visual innovation to its practice in earlier literary texts as well as other media. The heritage of Sterne's visual devices, and the sources of his distinctive visual narrative, span a range of print forms, from play scripts and sermons to handbooks and medical packaging. Within such a diverse body of work, Tristram Shandy emerges as a hybrid product of the eighteenth-century print shop, and the innovation of its author lies in importing into the novel existing and sometimes standard printing practices from other popular and widespread genres, which bring with them associations hitherto only available to eighteenth-century readers"-- Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.