Visual Sterneana: Graphic Afterlives and a Sense of Infinite Mobility
Résumé
This article explores how the notion of mobility resonates with visual responses
to Sterne’s fiction (1996-2016). With a specific focus on migration patterns of the
Sterne/Tristram/Yorick triad, it is argued that artists have created, in a variety of media,
a body of visual Sterneana characterised by embedded imaginary spaces and multiple
interpretative frames through a fluctuating proximity with the text and the enduring
ubiquity of eighteenth-century images in the form of graphic afterlives. Emblematic motifs
and isolated fragments, as well as circulation in cyberspace, also raise the issue of how the
word and image relationship is continuously reconfigured.