The Life of Books in Tristram Shandy

The transmigration of The Shandean from print to digital form provides an occasion for a reflection on the life of books in Tristram Shandy. Sterne is very alive to the physical properties of books, both in the way books are handled within Tristram Shandy and in his own treatment of his text. Thing Theory and the New Materialism provide a way for thinking about how books are treated as things and objects in Tristram Shandy. These methodologies draw attention to ways in which we might experience ‘things’ as intransigent and resistant to our desires, or ‘objects’ which are entailed in our subjectivity, or as ‘quasi-objects’ – items which might be of our creation but which we might experience as outside our control. In this article I argue that these terms do not adequately account for the variety of ways in which books come to life in Sterne’s hands. For one thing, when his characters read or even physically handle books, it is as if they are communing directly with their authors. For another, intradiegetic books are not real books; they do not behave like things/objects or quasi-objects in the world of the reader.