Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce's Masterwork

Henry Morton Robinson,Joseph Campbell

ISBN 10: 1608681661 / ISBN 13: 9781608681662

Published by New World Library March 2013, 2013

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 879861

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce's Masterwork
• Publisher: New World Library March 2013
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1608681661
• ISBN 13: 9781608681662
• Binding: Paper Back
• Condition: New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Mythology

About this title

Synopsis

Countless would-be readers of Finnegans Wake — James Joyce’s 1939 masterwork, on which he labored for a third of his life — have given up after a few pages and “dismissed the book as a perverse triumph of the unintelligible.” In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with novelist and poet Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first guide to understanding the fascinating world of Finnegans Wake. Page by page, chapter by chapter, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake outlines the basic action of Joyce’s book, simplifies and clarifies the complex web of images and allusions, and provides an understandable, continuous narrative from which the reader can venture out on his or her own. This edition includes a foreword and updates by Joyce scholar Dr. Edmund L. Epstein that add the context of sixty subsequent years of scholarship.

About the Author

Joseph Campbell is widely credited with bringing mythology to a mass audience. His works, including The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the four volume The Masks of God, and The Power of Myth (with Bill Moyers), rank among the classics in mythology and literature. Henry Morton Robinson was best known for his novel, The Cardinal.