Abstract A manuscript is lost or mislaid—typically, dropped somewhere—by its author; it is subsequently discovered and read aloud to an audience whose conflicting responses dramatize the contingency of reception, the subjectivity of interpretation, and the improbability of successful communication. This fictional situation, a variant of the old topos of the ‘found manuscript’, recurs across a variety of eighteenth-century texts. Identifying its paradigm in Addison’s Spectator, this essay tracks the device through Sterne’s mature writing, from A Political Romance, which hinges on the device, via the celebrated sermon scene in Book II of Tristram Shandy, to a central episode of the travel narrative of Book VII. The resulting analysis offers a new account of the genesis and structure of Sterne’s writing and its role within the development of new varieties of media self-consciousness in the eighteenth century.
Benjamin Dawson (Wed,) studied this question.