The PI’s major project output is a short monograph, entitled Networks of Reception in the Eighteenth-Century British Press and Laurence Sterne. This book explores key areas of Sterne’s reception, as mapped through periodicals, newspapers, and magazines, drawing on extensive research materials gathered through the project’s data-collection exercises, using online resources and in-person library visits.

The book focusses on examples from Britain and Ireland, with discussion of French and American press publications at salient points. It presents a careful synthesis of a vast and complex array of research materials, bringing them into a discussion that enhances understanding of Sterne’s reception, of wider press cultures, and of eighteenth-century reading and creative activities.

The chapters comprise:

• an introduction laying the theoretical terrain – critical and creative receptions; afterlives and adaptation; network theories; the nature and role of the press in reception; celebrity culture.
• a chapter on Sterne’s critical reviews, and their relation to adaptive techniques, comparable to those used by Sterne’s imitators in Sterneana.
• a chapter on excerpt culture, both reprinted extracts from Sterne’s fiction and those included in reviews, and as manifested in the recital of excerpts in theatres and public speaking venues.
• a chapter on creative Sterneana as found in newspapers and magazines: allusions, afterlives, ephemera, essay series, serialised journey narratives.

The monograph is under contract with Cambridge University Press and currently under review.