Finnegans Wake - Softcover

Joyce, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140042288 ISBN 13: 9780140042283

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1959

Synopsis

Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is significant for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's death, Finnegans Wake was Joyce's final work. The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which many critics believe were attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. Owing to the work's expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and abandonment of narrative conventions, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public. Despite the obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book's central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot. However, a number of key details remain elusive. The book discusses, in an unorthodox fashion, the Earwicker family, comprising the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book, in a nonlinear dream narrative, follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle. Many noted Joycean scholars such as Samuel Beckett and Donald Phillip Verene link this cyclical structure to Giambattista Vico's seminal text La Scienza Nuova ("The New Science"), upon which they argue Finnegans Wake is structured.

About this title

About the Author

Robbert-Jan Henkes and Eric Bindervoet are writers, translators, and artists based in Amsterdam. They translated Finnegans Wake into Dutch in 2002 in a bilingual edition, and it is their English setting that provides the text of this edition. Their translations of King Lear and Ulysses will appear in 2012. Finn Fordham is the author of Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake (2007) and I do I undo I redo: the Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves in Hopkins, Yeats, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf.

Review

The editors have provided a lucid introduction and a chapter-by-chapter outline which gives one at last a vague hold on what's going on, but it's not overburdened with notes, which frees one to stop worrying and just enjoy the surrealism and exuberance of Joyce's language. * Independent on Sunday * enhances the reader's textual awareness...The captivating, accessible and rich introduction by Finn Fordham enthuses first-time readers * James Joyce Broadsheet, Dirk Van Hulle *

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1959
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140042288
• ISBN 13: 9780140042283
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 628