In the works and letters of his later years Wilkie Collins continually expressed his displeasure over copyright violations. Wilkie Collins and Copyright Artistic Ownership in the Age of the Borderless Word by Sundeep Bisla asks whether that discontent might not also have affected the composition of Collinss major early works of the 1850s and 60s. Bislas investigation into this question surprisingly does not find an uncomplicated author uncomplicatedly launched on a defense of what he believes to be rightfully his. Instead Bisla finds an author locked in fierce negotiation with the theoretical underpinnings of his medium the written word underpinnings best delineated by the twentiethcentury deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. Collinss discomfort with copyright violation comes to be in tension with his budding understanding of the paradoxical nature of the iterability of the word a nature presenting itself as a conflict between the settling and breaking manifestations of linguistic repetition. In his efforts at resolving this paradox Collins adopts a mechanism of recursive selfreflexivity through which each story reflects upon itself to a more fundamental extent than had its predecessor. This selfreflexive exploration has significant consequences for the authors own iterabilitymenaced subjectivity a striking example of which can be seen in the fact that the name being sought in Collinss last masterpiece The Moonstone will end up being MY OWN NAME in other words WILKIE COLLINS.