178 Reviews writer?excessive, bawdy and satirical?when banged up forlife in a Victorian world. This was how he survived' (p. 144). But John Clare: A Literary Life is not just a clever attempt to remove Clare from the visionary gleam of Wordsworthian Romanticism and recontextualize him as a lifelong Regency poet. Sales draws heavily on six volumes of letters addressed to Clare, most of which are unpublished, and cross-references these with Clare's own letters and other material on Regency patronage and publishing, thus expanding our understanding of Clare's promotion and reception. Sidestepping the 'to punctuate or not to punctuate' battle, Sales asks us to accept that 'there are just differenttexts, all of interest, rather than one sacred object' (p. 70). The best aspect of this biography, though, is the emphasis throughout on Clare's sheer dedication to writing. Although there was only a brief period when his writing reached the public, Clare always wrote, even throughout the asylum years. Sales finishes with Clare's acknowledgement of his loss of expectations in the famous poem 'I am' (in which, paradoxically, Clare conquers despair by asserting that he 'is'), and quite rightlyreminds us that, afterall and amazingly, 'I am' also asserts itself as a poem and that 'this [. . .] writer survived hell on earth by never quite accepting that [his] expectations were over' (p. 163). Duncan Wu's Wordsworth: An Inner Life, almost inevitably, suffers by compari? son. Wu's central thesis is that 'Grief was the making of Wordsworth' (p. 1). This is explored through an odd kind of speculation, which might be called 'psychoanalytical ' were it more closely related to the work of, say, Freud or Klein. But Wu is 'not attempting a Freudian reading of Wordsworth; others have done that, and with greater expertise' (p. 15), and we are leftwith a quasi-psychoanalytical examination of Wordsworth's own self-examination. The result is that questions such as 'Why, then, should the 16 -year-old [orphaned] Wordsworth have equated imaginative vision with redemption from death? Why was he concerned with death at all?' (p. 22) become almost redundant, or are necessarily given incomplete psychological explanations, such as 'Their deaths must at times have felt like abandonment' (p. 76). The 'inner life' promise of the title, then, is problematical, but this is overcome by some illuminating biographical readings of Wordsworth's work, including the often neglected 'The Vale of Esthwaite', 'Descriptive Sketches', and 'The Borderers '. There is also a suggestive exploration ofthe negative effectson Wordsworth of Coleridge'senthusiasmfor 'The Recluse'. The most important aspect of Wordsworth: An Inner Life, however, is a reading of the fragmentary 1808 version of 'The White Doe of Rylstone' (which is helpfully printed in an appendix). Finally, the book con? tains nineteen reproductions of manuscripts which enable readers, through peering at Wordsworth's cramped crossings-out and emendations, to begin to appreciate the vast effortthat editors, such as Duncan Wu, expend on our behalf. University of Reading Myra Cottingham Beckett and Philosophy. Ed. by Richard Lane. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. x+184 pp. ?37-50- ISBN 0-333-91879-7. In true Beckettian fashion the contributors to this collection of essays have difnculty in starting and difnculty in finishing. In each case an effortis made to bring a modern philosopher's thought to bear on something of Beckett's; after an introduction and two general essays, the philosophers thus employed are a good selection of the usual suspects: Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou, Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, Habermas, Heidegger, Nietzsche. The question today, and this makes the volume topical and interesting, is whether the current poststructuralist Beckett will give place to some post-poststructuralist version of himself and ifso, under the aegis of which thinkers? MLR, 99.1, 2004 179 So here we are beyond the Descartes, Berkeley, and Wittgenstein of early Beckett criticism and involved neither with Schopenhauer nor with existentialism. We have moved on. The matter in hand now concerns the question how postfoundational is Beckett? Or is there something more that he also is? The essays that take up this matter here do so with mixed success. On the whole the good essays are the comprehensible ones. The others are...