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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.

This thesis examines the periodical culture that operated in late eighteenth-century Britain (predominantly though not exclusively in London) and the ways in which it made the female ‘stars’ of the stage. I propose that actresses’ celebrity was in part made in the media; the press coverage they received has not had the same attention as their treatment through other media, such as the memoir or portraiture. Through a combination of literary and cultural analysis, this thesis examines the ‘media texts’ that circulated in the periodical press about three contemporaneous actresses: Sarah Siddons, Elizabeth Farren and Mary Wells. Three central questions drive this thesis. What role did the periodical press play in the development of actresses’ celebrity in the late eighteenth century? What rhetorical strategies were used in the newspapers to represent actresses’ public identities and how did these verbal images correspond with other media? How did readers and subjects engage with news media as a shared space for shaping celebrity identities? In exploring answers to these questions this work aims to contribute to the ongoing reevaluation of the centrality of media in early celebrity and to an understanding of the daily, weekly and monthly circulation of motifs that created and sustained celebrity identities. It also makes the case that an emergent celebrity culture in this period was shaped in and through an exploration of gendered (female) performance and the limits of its agency. Part I describes the media landscape in relation to the stage. Chapter 1 describes the ways in which the stage represented newspapers and their reception. Chapter 2 turns to the ways in which newspapers represented the stage. Part II offers case studies. Chapter 3 argues that the press treated ambivalently Sarah Siddons’s background as a stroller. Chapter 4 focuses on the kind of ‘credit’ newspapers accorded Elizabeth Farren’s portrayal of the character of the ‘lady’ on and off stage. And Chapter 5 demonstrates that, despite her close association with newspapers, Mary Wells failed to secure the kind of celebrity she craved through the press.