Tour of the Darkling Plain: The "Finnegans Wake" Letters of Thornton Wilder andAdaline Glasheen.195: The "Finnegans Wake" Letters of Thornton Wilder andAdaline Glasheen.195 - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1900621541 ISBN 13: 9781900621540

Publisher: Univ College Dubli, 2019

Synopsis

These unpublished letters between the esteemed teacher and literary critic, Adaline Glasheen, and the great American writer, Thornton Wilder, were written over a twenty-five year period, from 1950 to 1975. They reveal the probing energy and encyclopedic knowledge they each brought to Joyce's book, back when it was still a most mysterious work. Glasheen is well known as the author of the ground-breaking Census to the Wake, while Wilder was for many years an avid amateur reader and interpreter of the book (for years he traveled with a densely annotated copy of the book), and drew on it for his play, The Skin of Our Teeth. These letters are maps of almost boundless range of references, symbols, and allusions. They will help many others to tour the darkling plain that is Finnegans Wake.

About this title

About the Author:

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was an accomplished novelist and playwright whose works, exploring the connection between the commonplace and cosmic dimensions of human experience, continue to be read and produced around the world. His Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of seven novels, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, as did two of his four full-length dramas, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1943). Wilder's The Matchmaker was adapted as the musical Hello, Dolly!. He also enjoyed enormous success with many other forms of the written and spoken word, among them teaching, acting, the opera, and films. (His screenplay for Hitchcock's Shadow of Doubt [1943] remains a classic psycho-thriller to this day.) Wilder's many honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee's Medal for Literature.

Review:

"The fourteen appendices by both critics will further enthral Joyce scholars as they un-pick the master's verbal gymnastics, allusions, references and puns ... This is an exciting feast of Joyceana." Books Ireland Summer 2001 "it is unusually easy for the scholar to use because of its extensive index, line by line, th the scattered annotations ... this book joins the small group of commentaries indispensable to the committed scholar." CHOICE Feb 2002 "an important resource for anyone interested in Finnegan's Wake, and the observations collected here will remain for a good number of years an important stimulus for continued examination of Joyce's masterpiece." Irish Literary Supplement Spring 2002

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ College Dubli
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1900621541
• ISBN 13: 9781900621540
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 750
• Editor: M. Burns Edward, Gaylord Joshua