ABSTRACT
Ellipsis points are an appropriate visual symbol of such preoccupations: foregrounding gaps and silences, typographically fragmenting the 'fullness' of the page and thus marking the hiatus between word and any determinable or stable sense of meaning. The concern with silence or absence is not a twentieth-century privilege, nor is the typographical presentation of omission or 'ellipsis'. Ellipsis marks became a symbol of division intrinsic to what Maurice Kyffin saw as the play's meaning, as one character cuts across another. According to the Oxford English Dictionary neither 'ellipsis' nor 'eclipsis' was used to denote punctuation marks until the early nineteenth century, when Lindley Murray in his 1824 English Grammar described the dash as an 'ellipsis'. The philosophic and scientific concerns of the eighteenth century led to a reaction against the very principle of ellipsis. Laurence Sterne is often lauded for his typographical originality, but the placing of ellipsis at the heart of the literary experience was not a Shandean innovation.
