Sheila M. Kearns, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Romantic Autobiography: Reading Strategies of Self-representation. London: Associated University Press, 1995. ISBN: 0838635466 (hardback) Price: £26

Sheila M. Kearns' Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Romantic Autobiography: Reading Strategies of Self-Representation is the most recent work in a long series of attempts at interpretating Wordsworth's The Prelude and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria from an autobiographical point of view. However, Kearns' book stands apart from the previous works on this subject by the extent of her analysis of The Prelude and Biographia Literaria which is in the best scholarly manner. This is certainly one of the best book to have appeared on the subject of autobiography in relation to Wordsworth and Coleridge for several years; anyone interested in that subject should definitely read it. Kearns is perfectly aware of the intrinsic difficulty of discussing autobiographical works following the "advent of poststructuralist theories of language and subjectivity" (13) Thus, she devotes her first chapter to a presentation of the current theories, evoking first the 'traditional' notion of autobiography (with references, among others, to Roy Pascal's Design and Truth in Autobiography , James Olnes' Metaphors of the Self , and Philippe Lejeune's Le Pacte Autobiographique ). She then moves on to discuss Derrida's important contribution to the genre of autobiography, and discusses briefly Starobinsky's article 'The Style of Autobiography'. Starobinsky comments that "Every autobiography—even when it limits itself to pure narrative—is a self-interpretation". There is indeed an element of doubt about the veracity of the story which should be borne in mind whenever one reads an autobiography, the story perhaps being fictionalised. The problem that the reader faces is that s/he cannot know whether the story is autobiographical or fictionalised if s/he does not have a preliminary knowledge of the author's life. Although Starobinsky's account contains valuable insights, Kearns mentions the limit(ation)s of Starobinsky's analysis by pointing out that he "examines autobiographical writing so as to try to see through it and to gain a view of the essential subject of the text" (24). John Sturrock argues along the same line as Starobinsky when he declares: However, a question arises: how are we to define the author? Indeed, even though it is agreed that it is by comparing the past 'I' with the present 'I' that the autobiography can take place, Benveniste observes that, linguistically speaking, there is no concept such as 'I' and that the 'I' refers to the one who is speaking and that we can identify him/her by the very fact that s/he is speaking. This remark is crucial in the sense that, for a text to be autobiographical, the 'I' has to refer to the author, and if there is no longer an author, a text cannot be autobiographical; the text being only text and nothing outside of it. Of course, one is reminded of Roland Barthes' statement that Surpringly, Kearns does not mention Roland Barthes in her book, nor even includes him in her bibliography, the only minor flaw in the entire book. Kearns accurately asserts that the conventional view of autobiographical writings as defined by Starobinsky is challenged by poststructuralist theories of language with regard to the notion of stability in writing and the possibility of recovering an author's past through language. Kearns also discusses Foucault's theory of "author-function" from his essay 'What is an Author?', and rightly retains its main argument for her own analysis of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's works. In fact, one of the very good points of Kearns' study is that she manages to bring into the discussion 'controversial' issues (especially at a time when referring to poststructuralism is certainly not in conformity with the New Historicist approach of the day) and then provides the reader with an in-depth analysis of The Prelude and …