James Joyce and the Philosophers at Finnegans Wake explores how Joyce used the philosophers Nicholas Cusanus, Giordano Bruno, and Giambattista Vico as the basis upon which to write Finnegans Wake. Very few Joyce critics know enough about these philosophers and therefore often miss their influence on Joyce's great work. Joyce embraces these philosophic companions to lead him through the underworld of history with all its repetitions and resurrections, oppositions and recombinations. We as philosophical readers of the Wake go along with them to meet everybody and in so doing are bound "to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy" of our souls the "uncreated conscience" of humankind. Verene builds his study on the basis of years of teaching Finnegans Wake side by side with Cusanus, Bruno, and Vico, and his book will serve as a guide to readers of Joyce's novel.

This innovative analysis shows how James Joyce uses the language of prayer to grapple with profoundly human ideas in Finnegans Wake—the dreamlike masterpiece that critics have called his “book of the night.” Colleen Jaurretche moves beyond what scholars know about how Joyce composed this work to suggest why he wrote and arranged it as he did. Jaurretche provides a sequential reading of the four chapters and corresponding themes of the Wake from the perspective of prayer. She examines image, manifested by the letters of the alphabet and the Book of Kells; magic, which Joyce equates with the workings of language; dreams, which he relates to poetry; and speech, glorified in the Wake for its potential to express emotions and ecstasy. Jaurretche bases her study on important thinkers from antiquity to the present, including Origen of Alexandria, Giambattista Vico, and Giordano Bruno. She demonstrates how these philosophers influenced Joyce’s view that prayer can imbue language with power. This book is an illuminating and much-needed interpretation of a work that abounds with echoes and cadences of sacred language. Jaurretche’s insights will guide readers’ understanding of the style and structure of Finnegans Wake. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is the first study to offer complete and comprehensive explanations of the most significant philosophical references in James Joyce's avant-garde masterpiece. Philosophy is important in all of Joyce's works, but it is his final novel which most fully engages with that field. Robert Baines shows the broad range of philosophers Joyce wove into his last work, from Aristotle to Confucius, Bergson to Kant. For each major philosophical allusion in Finnegans Wake, this book explains the original idea and reveals how Joyce first encountered it. Drawing upon extensive research into Joyce's notebooks and drafts, Baines then shows how Joyce developed and adapted that idea through repeated revisions. From here, the final form of the idea as it appears in the Wake is explored. In carefully examining the Wake's key philosophical allusions, essential themes within the novel come into focus, including history, time, language, being, and perception. We see also how those allusions combine to create a network of ideas, thinkers, and texts which has a logic and an integrity. Ultimately, Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake shows that the more one knows of the Wake's philosophical allusions, the more one can find meaning and reason in this famously perplexing book of the night.

This collection charts the vital contextual backgrounds to James Joyce's life and writing. The essays collectively show how Joyce was rooted in his times, how he is both a product and a critic of his multiple contexts, and how important he remains to the world of literature, criticism and culture.

“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

Dividing his youth between the United States and the bilingual Alsace-Lorraine, Eugene Jolas (1894-1952) flourished in three languages. As an editor and poet, he came to know the major writers and artists of his time and enjoyed a pivotal position between the Anglo-American and Continental avant-garde. His editorship of transition, the leading avant-garde journal of Paris in the twenties and early thirties, provided a major impetus to writers from James Joyce (whose Finnegans Wake was serialized in transition) to Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett, with first translations of André Breton, and Franz Kafka, among others. Jolas's critical work, collected in this volume, includes introductions to anthologies, manifestoes like the famous Vertical, essays, some published here for the first time, on writers as various as Novalis, Trakl, the major Surrealists, Heidegger, and other philosophers. An acute observer of the literary scene as well as of the roiling politics of the time, Jolas emerges here in his role at the very center of avant-garde activity between the wars. Accordingly, this book is of signal importance to anyone with an interest in modernism, avant-garde, multilingualism, and the culture of Western Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

After God, Shakespeare created most, James Joyce wrote in Ulysses. The importance of Shakespeare in Ulysses has been often discussed and documented; that this royal bard is as central and omnipresent in Finnegans Wake has been roundly agreed upon by Joyce scholars, yet no printed volume has exhaustively investigated the topic. This study arrives, therefore, as a welcome and timely look into the assertion, as on critic put it, that "Finnegans Wake is about Shakespeare." "Throughout his life," Dr. Cheng writes, "Joyce was in the habit of comparing himself to England's national poet." In the Wake, Shakespeare--his life, his plays and his characters--forms a "dense and extensive matrix of allusion." Part I of this book provides a critical and interpretative view of how Shakespearean influences and allusions illuminate the themes and meanings of the Wake; the chapters are arranged to follow general patterns of allusion and motif. Part II comprises explications of a thousand Shakespearean allusions in Finnegans Wake, recorded by page and line of the novel. Finally, Part III is a set of appendixes which list the Shakespearean allusions by play, act, scene, and line for easy reference.

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.

Timothy Martin documents Joyce's exposure to Wagner's operas, and defines a pervasive Wagnerian presence in his work.

James Joyce's Ulysses, once regarded as obscure and obscene, is now viewed as one of the masterpieces of world literature. Yet Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake, to which he devoted seventeen years, remains virtually unread, except by scholarly specialists. Its linguistic novelties, apparently based on an immense learning that few can share, make it appear impenetrable. Joyce's Kaleidoscope attempts to dissolve the darkness and to invite lovers of literature to engage with Finnegans Wake. Philip Kitcher proposes that the Wake has at its core an age-old philosophical question, "What makes a life worth living?", and that Joyce explores that question from the perspective of someone who feels that a long life is now ending. So the complex dream language is a way of investigating issues that are hard to face directly; the reader is invited to struggle with the novel's aging dreamer who seeks reassurance about the worth of what he has done and been. Joyce finds his way to reassurance. The sweeping music and the high comedy of Finnegans Wake celebrate the ordinary doings of ordinary people. With great humanity and a distinctive brand of humanism, Joyce points us to the things that matter in our lives. His final novel is a festival of life itself. From this perspective, the supposedly opaque, or nonsensical, language opens up as a rich source for the reader's reflections: though readers won't all approach it the same way, or with the same set of references, there is meaning in it for everyone. Kitcher's detailed study of the entire text brings out its musical resonances and its musical structures. It analyzes the novel overall while bringing deep insight to the reading of key individual passages. This engaging guide will aid readers not just to make sense of the novel, but to relish the remarkable accomplishment of Joyce's least appreciated work.