ABSTRACT
Playing upon the visual imaginations of generations of artists, Laurence Sterne’s texts have spawned scores of illustrated editions as well as numerous renderings in paintings, prints, and sculpture. This pictorial canon portrays more than Sterne’s descriptions: mixed in with his mid-eighteenth-century text are portions of subtle but salient hints of attitudes toward the author and his themes. Generated by words but, in turn, generating its own independent meaning, the imagemakes up the core of literary illustration. Like written texts, images invite multiple perspectives: the proverbial thousand words are never the same. In this chapter, I will briefly explore the idea of the image and frame a methodology for the interpretation of literary illustrations-that is, a means of translating pictures into words. This methodology will play a key role in the remainder of this study, which particularly is interested in how verbal meaning is generated from images derived from Sterne’s texts, and how this pictorial meaning augments and alters the originating source. In illustration, William Hogarth’s rendition of Trim reading the sermon will be compared to Sterne’s passage as both a representation of verbal meaning and a manifestation of contemporaneous cultural ideas.
