This chapter explores how the Chinese woodcut rose to prominence on a surge of social and ethnographic interest among Chinese artists over the 1930s who, through the medium, sought to speak for the voiceless and downtrodden, and increasingly of those in rural contexts. The chapter aims to show how the woodcut genre helped create a new political position that personified the popular experience of what became known as the old society: if revolutionary memory was a form of overarching metanarrative joining the past to the present, what populated its landscape were what this chapter calls forsaken subjects. These subjects inhabited a civic vacuum of predatory social relations, moribund in its capacity for historical change and therefore backward and “feudal.” Over the course of war with Japan and its aftermath of civil war, the woodcut evolved from portrayals of social desolation – of moral impasse and cultural failures – to affirmative messaging, one that assigned new codes, values and frames of reference to social life, at times executed with the juxtaposition of the old and new China. The woodcut, as this chapter aims to show, offered a visual analog to May Fourth-New Culture depictions of communal life a quarter of a century earlier.

The second chapter deals with the black page commemorating the death of parson Yorick, often perceived as the pre-eminent symbol of Stern’s experimentation. This chapter suggests that with the black page, Sterne references a longstanding tradition of woodcut ornaments and mourning typography in funeral publications from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, but which had reached their peak in the 1612 commemorations of the death of Henry, Prince of Wales. But he comments on how far this form of typographic commemoration has become clichéd by drawing from two recent typesetting trends: the representation of major funeral processions in newspapers and gravestone-like pages in the mid-century novel, as evidenced in Tom Jones (1749), Peregrine Pickle (1751) and William Toldervy’s Two Orphans (1756). Through considering the rarely studied mourning borders around Yorick’s epitaph alongside the black page’s double-sided covering of black ink, this chapter sees Sterne engaging with past and contemporary clichés of mourning iconography while playing upon – and pushing to its limits – the novelistic epitaph’s self-conscious manipulation of the printed page.

The final chapter considers Sterne’s use of engraved lines as illustrations of digression. Contextualising the print history of lines, the chapter examines the history of the dance manual, which, like that of Tristram Shandy, is one of innovation. Dance manuals were visual texts that had to be ever more experimental in their attempt to instruct by means of the printed page. Tristram Shandy shares with Beauchamp-Feuillet manuals diagrams which become demystified through labelling: the four plotlines closing volume 6 and Trim’s flourish in volume 9. Sterne defers annotating these lines to encourage the reader to encounter the digressive text in a looping and non-linear manner. Trim’s flourish is remarkably like the symbols which in the Beauchamp-Feuillet dance notation system represent arm movements or dance steps, and the serpentine, Hogarthian progress of a dance like the minuet, one of the most popular dances of the mid-eighteenth century. Like Sterne’s use of dance in Tristram Shandy, Trim’s flourish, when read alongside eighteenth-century dance notation, signifies both the one-off movement of his stick and the inability of anyone in Sterne’s novel to progress in a straight line.