Reviewed by: A Culture of Mimicry: Laurence Sterne, His Readers, and the Art of Bodysnatching by Warren L. Oakley Matthew J. Kinservik Warren L. Oakley . A Culture of Mimicry: Laurence Sterne, His Readers, and the Art of Bodysnatching. London : Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association , 2010 . Pp. xvii + 200 . $37.90 . Mr. Oakley’s brief monograph introduces bodysnatching and mimicry to describe how others manipulated Sterne’s texts and his reputation. Where David A. Brewer in The Afterlife of Character, 1726–1825 focuses on the ways in which readers extended the imagined lives of literary characters beyond their source texts, Mr. Oakley is more interested in the ways that both the author and the works were adapted and reimagined. Given that Sterne blurred the lines between himself, Tristram, and Yorick, consideration of the afterlife of his texts needs to account for the author as well as his characters. But why mimicry and bodysnatching? Mr. Oakley claims that these analogies are important because of the close association between Sterne and his works: to adapt or extend Sterne’s works is to mimic Sterne and to manipulate his literary corpus. In defining mimicry, Mr. Oakley asserts that it was an illicit, but growing, part of British culture at midcentury. He cites Samuel Foote as exemplifying transgressive mimicry, but this old view ignores the many ways in which Foote’s supposed transgressions were sanctioned by authority because he almost always deployed them in its service. The bodysnatching analogy was suggested by rumors that Sterne was anatomized after his death, and Mr. Oakley sees parallels in the ways in which Sterne’s works were anthologized and adapted. I am not convinced that either analogy is necessary or illuminating, and the book does not consistently rely on either of these thematic emphases. Where René Bosch’s Labyrinth of Digressions (Rodopi, 2007) surveys Sternean imitations, Mr. Oakley’s book more closely looks at a handful of works “from the genteelly polite to the outrageously impolite” that “were often controversial in some way and now little-known.” This is not a sharp set of criteria for selection, and consequently the chapters do not neatly follow one another. His initial chapter argues for a close and meaningful relationship between Garrick’s acting style—especially his use of dramatic pauses and abrupt shifts of emotion—and Sterne’s extensive use of the dash in his literary works and correspondence. As Joseph Roach has shown (‘“The Uncreating Word’: Silence and Unspoken Thought in Fielding’s Drama”), the use of a dash can be a significant clue to staging and meaning in a play text. But Garrick’s pauses and Sterne’s dashes do not necessarily enjoy a [End Page 168] causal relationship, and although Mr. Oakley never asserts such a causal link, the connection underwrites his chapter. The result: a smart, if ultimately unconvincing, discussion of Garrick’s acting style and its influence on Sterne’s correspondence and his Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal. Notwithstanding long comparisons, I admire how Mr. Oakley’s considerations influence the theatrical practices on private expression and print publication. The strongest chapter discusses Leonard McNally’s 1782 stage adaptation of Tristram Shandy (Tristram Shandy, a Sentimental, Shandean Bagatelle, in Two Acts). Mr. Oakley distinguishes between the aims of McNally’s play text and its performance by the Covent Garden company. Like the anthologists who culled the sentimental “beauties” of Sterne’s work and excised the vulgar elements, McNally offered a clean, light comic text, eschewing Sterne’s bawdry. However, by casting the low comic actor Richard Wilson as Uncle Toby, the Covent Garden troupe produced an earthier afterpiece. The chapter nicely illustrates the ongoing tension between Sterne’s sentimental and sexual reputation. In large part, the second half of Mr. Oakley’s study focuses on this dichotomy in Sterne’s reputation between fine feeling and vulgarity. “Erotic Yorick, the Man of Feeling” considers these two elements as related, not antithetical. He reads A Sentimental Journey, the anonymous Yorick’s Sentimental Journey Continued, and John Hall-Stevenson’s Crazy Tales in light of new scholarship on eighteenth-century erotica that identifies a jocular and sociable streak in it. But it is too great...