Bodies of Type: Tristram Shandy in the Bagnio

This article considers for the first time Tristram Shandy as a text printed in a building that was once a bagnio. Drawing from a body of feminist scholarship on the history of the book since the 1990s and considering the history of Sterne’s printing relationship with the Wards’ establishment, this article reads the role of the bagnio in the literary imagination at mid-century alongside Tristram Shandy ’s origin in an ambiguous site of (re)production. Through examining the impact of the gendered metaphors at play in contemporary discourse around printing and copyright upon our reading of literary texts that claim either in their imprints or simply by tradition to have been generated in sites associated with sexual possibility, this article analyses the genderedness that Sterne himself played upon to produce a comic text disruptive of the usual binary structures of human and print reproduction.