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Chapter 2 - The Black Page

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2021

Helen Williams
Affiliation:
Northumbria University, Newcastle
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Summary

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.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • The Black Page
  • Helen Williams, Northumbria University, Newcastle
  • Book: Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book
  • Online publication: 06 April 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108904162.003
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  • The Black Page
  • Helen Williams, Northumbria University, Newcastle
  • Book: Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book
  • Online publication: 06 April 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108904162.003
Available formats
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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.

  • The Black Page
  • Helen Williams, Northumbria University, Newcastle
  • Book: Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book
  • Online publication: 06 April 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108904162.003
Available formats
×