Laurence Sterne's Textual Commerce
Keywords: Credit
Oeconomy
Fiction
Chaptering
Commerce
Authorship
Book Trade
Literature
Character
Criticism
Satire
Novel
Laurence Sterne
Eighteenth Century

Laurence Sterne’s Textual Commerce provides a study of Laurence Sterne as a commercial writer. It demonstrates how his correspondence and transactions with booksellers in York and London, his methods of self-promotion, and his early critical reception as a writer of ‘great oeconomy’ shaped his authorial practice as provisional and, in Thomas Keymer’s terms, open to ‘determination from without’. In examining commercial exigency in relation to Sterne’s authorship between 1759-1768, I combine two areas of enquiry that can appear distinct: studies of writers’ interactions with the book trade, which often appear under the rubric of ‘book history’, and studies of the affinity between ‘fictionality’ and ‘credit’, which often perform at a more abstract conceptual level. I argue that, within Sterne’s career and writings, each illuminates the other: the terms of credit he negotiates with his booksellers mark the precise point at which the material fabrication of his books meets abstract concerns with reputation and value in his fiction.
Chapter 1 examines Tristram Shandy’s function as a publishing protagonist. It shows how Sterne’s correspondence with bookseller Robert Dodsley changes the purview of his writings from a Swiftian satire on ecclesiastical intriguing to a ‘general’ and (within the context of the mid-century marketplace) ‘more sale< b >~a~ble’ (Letters, 97) fiction where readers no longer pursue coded real-life scandals behind parodies. Instead, readers engage sympathetically with a ‘creditable’ quasi-person, who, because he resists being ‘unlocked’ by keys or reduced to assorted referents, can be named and perform for Sterne as a publisher in advertisements for his Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1760).
Chapter 2 addresses Sterne’s chaptering in relation to the shifting term ‘oeconomy’. Chaptering allows Sterne at times to figure his text within a domestic architecture, at others to order a repository for his imagined Shandean archives. This connects Sterne’s chapters to older conceptions of ‘oeconomy’ as the management of household resources. Yet Sterne also explores how arranging a fiction using chapters might affect its market value. Inventorying chapters allows him to create a structure of deferred value in his serial text, strengthening his credit with readers at a time when Tristram Shandy’s continuation under new bookselling arrangements is not assured. At other points, Sterne self-consciously claims to exchange or reorder chapters with the aim of eliding affective and commercial value.
Chapter 3 focuses on Sterne’s exchanges with the mid-eighteenth century’s critical reviews. Published serially, Tristram Shandy’s instalments are subject to unprecedented scrutiny from these new market-driven periodicals. The long-running dialogue that ensues between Sterne and the reviewers centres on questions of taste and on the respective credit each holds with their commercial readerships. As a metaphor, taste makes readers consumers. Moreover, like credit, the discourse of taste relies on an elusive je ne sais quoi, or tipping point, which emerges from aggregate experience, but is irreducible to any exact set of experiences. For Sterne, it also holds a bifurcated temporality. The critical ‘tasting’ of his fiction marks a present moment of discrimination that augurs its consecration in history.