James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is an iconic text of 20th-century literature, an avant-garde epic that has inspired experimental work in such diverse fields as music, art, philosophy, and film. Finn Fordham's critical introduction looks at how it was written and asks what this can tell us about the hundreds of things it seems to be about.
Since its publication in 1939, countless would-be readers of "Finnegans Wake" - James Joyce's masterwork, which consumed a third of his life - have given up after a few pages, dismissing it as a "perverse triumph of the unintelligible." In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first "key" or guide to entering the fascinating, disturbing, marvelously rich world of "Finnegans Wake." The authors break down Joyce's "unintelligible" book page by page, stripping the text of much of its obscurity and serving up thoughtful interpretations via footnotes and bracketed commentary. They outline the book's basic action, and then simplify -- and clarify -- its complex web of images and allusions. "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake" is the latest addition to the "Collected Works of Joseph Campbell" series.
"Finnegans Wake" is the most deliberately obscure and difficult work in literature. Readers are over their heads and struggling for shore by the second sentence. The "Wake" is often described as unreadable, and that's not entirely unfair given the book's setting in the dark night of the subconscious and dreams where strange shapes shift and merge in a multitude of motifs and the fact that it's written in mixture of many of the world's languages now known as Wakese. "Finnegans Wake" refers to itself as a "nightmaze," something readers translate as nightmare. But what seems at first sight as meaningless, actually has more meanings than can be imagined, and what appears as unreadable requires only a radically new look at what words can be made to do. "Riverrun to Livvy" is a literary layman's attempt to enlighten Joyce's "book of the dark" for a wider audience, inviting those who want to be "well letterread" on a journey into the twilight zone of literature. The first page of "Finnegans Wake" has been compared to the first second of the Big Bang, containing as it does all the elemental materials that compose the complete creation. Through a close reading of the "Wake's" first page, "Riverrun to Livvy" prepares readers to tackle the remaining 627 pages with a greater degree of insight and understanding. It's been said that no one can be considered truly educated without having read at least one page of "Finnegans Wake." "Riverrun to LIvvy" dares readers not only to pick up the gauntlet by reading one page but to boldly go where few readers have gone before, all the way through literature's most terrifying text.
“Joyce’s Book of the Dark gives us such a blend of exciting intelligence and impressive erudition that it will surely become established as one of the most fascinating and readable Finnegans Wake studies now available.”—Margot Norris, James Joyce Literary Supplement
This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘Finnegans Wake’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Complete Works of James Joyce’. Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Joyce includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily. eBook features: * The complete unabridged text of ‘Finnegans Wake’ * Beautifully illustrated with images related to Joyce’s works * Individual contents table, allowing easy navigation around the eBook * Excellent formatting of the textPlease visit www.delphiclassics.com to learn more about our wide range of titles
The biggest stumbling block facing any prospective reader of "Finnegans Wake" is the book itself, with its thousands of words of Joyce's inventions, derived from nearly every foreign language imaginable and from a host of other sources. Now extensively revised, expanded, and corrected, Roland McHugh's "Annotations" is a unique one-volume guidebook designed to be read side by side with the "Wake" itself.
James Joyce's astonishing final text, Finnegans Wake (1939), is universally acknowledged to be entirely untranslatable. And yet, no fewer than fifteen complete renderings of the 628-page text exist to date, in twelve different languages altogether – and at least ten further complete renderings have been announced as underway for publication in the early 2020s, in nine different languages. Finnegans Wakes delineates, for the first time in any language, the international history of these renderings and discusses the multiple issues faced by translators. The book also comments on partial and fragmentary renderings from some thirty languages altogether, including such perhaps unexpected languages as Galician, Guarani, Chinese, Korean, Turkish, and Irish, not to mention Latin and Ancient Egyptian. Excerpts from individual renderings are analysed in detail, together with brief biographical notes on numerous individual translators. Chronicling renderings spanning multiple decades, Finnegans Wakes illustrates the capacity of Joyce's final text to generate an inexhaustible multiplicity of possible meanings among the ever-increasing number of its impossible translations.
The manuscripts of modern writers are a labyrinth, but they have become an exciting new destination for literary scholarship. In this lively, lucid and original study, Finn Fordham looks at the draft manuscripts of six great modernist writers - Hopkins, Yeats, Conrad, Forster, Joyce and Woolf - to compare their variety of writing processes.