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Chapter 5 - Footnotes and Catchwords

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2021

Helen Williams
Affiliation:
Northumbria University, Newcastle
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Summary

By mid-century, novel readers began to expect a printed framework for reading prose narrative consisting of cues such as page numbers, catchwords, chapter divisions and notes. This chapter tells the backstory of this navigational framework of the eighteenth-century novel that Sterne disrupts, before analysing his experimentation with mise en page. This study of Sterne’s manipulation of seemingly untouchable conventions of the printed page, such as pagination and catchwords, complements an approach to his more widely recognised interference with footnotes and chapters, and reveals the full extent of Sterne’s pioneering disruption of the format of the eighteenth-century book. I argue that Sterne’s innovations with footnotes, catchwords, chapters and pagination combine aspects of Scriblerian satire with more recent but perhaps lesser-known interventions in the codex by Thomas Amory in John Buncle (1756). Unlike Swift and Pope, however, and like Amory, Sterne deploys footnotes in the first edition of Tristram Shandy, encouraging the reader to approach at once all sections of the page in search of meaning and raising questions about literary authority from the outset.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • Footnotes and Catchwords
  • Helen Williams, Northumbria University, Newcastle
  • Book: Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book
  • Online publication: 06 April 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108904162.006
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  • Footnotes and Catchwords
  • Helen Williams, Northumbria University, Newcastle
  • Book: Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book
  • Online publication: 06 April 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108904162.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Footnotes and Catchwords
  • Helen Williams, Northumbria University, Newcastle
  • Book: Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book
  • Online publication: 06 April 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108904162.006
Available formats
×