Finnegans Wake

With an Introduction by Professor Len Platt, Professor of Modern Literatures, Head of Goldsmiths Learning Enhancement Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Finnegans Wake is the book of Here Comes Everybody and Anna Livia Plurabelle and their family - their book, but in a curious way the book of us all as well as all our books. Joyce's last great work, it is not comprised of many borrowed styles, like Ulysses, but, rather, formulated as one dense, tongue-twisting sound scape.

This 'language' is based on English vocabulary and syntax but, at the same time, self-consciously designed to function as a pun machine with an astonishing capacity for resisting singularity of meaning.

Announcing a 'revolution of the word', this astonishing book amounts to a powerfully resonant cultural critique - a unique kind of miscommunication which, far from stabilising the world in meaning, constructs a universe radically unfixed by a wild diversity of possibilities and potentials.

It also remains the most hilarious, 'obscene', book of innuendos ever to be imagined.

About the Author

Irish novelist, noted for his experimental use of language in such works as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Throughout his career Joyce was dogged by rejections from publishers, suppression by censors, attacks by critics and misunderstanding by readers. Although he and his family spent most of their time abroad, his country of birth always remained basic to his writings. James Augustus Aloysius Joyce was born in Dublin to a fairly poor middle-class family, he was educated at two Jesuit schools, Clongowes Wood College in Kildare and Belvedere College in Dublin.