9 - Sterne and print culture

Summary

Although Laurence Sterne would not have used the phrase 'print culture', he had a developed conception of the constellation of socio-economic and aesthetic factors clustered around the print medium, and he understood how to exploit these in an authorial career based on, though extending beyond, his literary work on the page. Sterne's expressions, in his letters and published work, of his awareness of the opportunities made possible by print allow us to define 'print culture' in his own terms. The main categories by which he recognised print culture were both public and private, combining an acute awareness of the market for literary works - the power of public opinion and the tools (patronage, reviews) by which a reading public is created and maintained - with a philosophical conception of the existential implications of printed expression for notions of individuality and originality. For Sterne, print culture manifested itself in three basic categories: fame (the social phenomenon of the celebrity), finance (the business of professional authorship), and physicality (the printed artefact). Both the social-cultural aspects of print culture (fame and finance) and the concretely material (physicality) mark an intersection of public and private. Not only is the print marketplace a locus of exchange where private written expression is made public; the printed text itself is also, for Sterne, a place where author and reader interact, and a point of contact that reveals the unbridgeable gap between participants in the act of communication.