Laurence Sterne offers perhaps the most valuable case study of a mid- eighteenth-century literary career. His decision at age 45 to "turn author" is uniquely premeditated, yet his uncertainty about the conditions of authorship in the literary world he so assertively entered is equally remarkable. Both his self-consciousness and his confusion can be traced with considerable accuracy in letters, Tristram Shandy, and A Sentimental Journey. They make up the history of his struggle to discover what it meant to be an author in his time. We can mark each stage of his unsteady progress toward attaining celebrity and understanding the nature of his own fame. We can also observe, in the rise and decline of the Tristram Shandy fashion in the early 1760s and the subsequent success of A Sentimental Journey in the late 1760s, how one author responded to gaining, then losing, then regaining the adulation of the various publics that defined him as a cultural figure.

Sterne's case is an especially illustrative one for this study because he reenacts the transition from patrons and a coterie audience to booksellers and a consuming public that had transformed authorship as a whole during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Though that transformation took place over a period of more than a century, Sterne, I will argue, experienced it all during his brief career as a writer. in a way that is matched perhaps only by Samuel Johnson's indignant rejection of Lord Chesterfield's patronage in 1755, the story of Sterne's career is emblematic of the most basic . . .