Finnegans Wake (eBook)
The groundbreaking classic ‘Finnegans Wake’ is James Joyce's last and most experimental book. This humorous book, which debuted in 1939, is a modern Irish literary classic. Joyce wrote for almost twenty years, trying to evoke a dreamy, nighttime atmosphere. Major historical and mythological conflicts are reenacted in the dreams. It is regarded as one of the hardest English-language novels ever written.
The intricate book combines the actual world with a dreamscape. Inspired by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico in the eighteenth century, the central theme of the novel is that history is cyclical. The first part of the novel's opening phrase serves as the book's demonstration of this. As a result, the first line is a part of the last line and the last line is truly a part of the first line. The work explores several broken story threads, making the plot itself hard to follow. However, the juxtaposition of dream and reality—achieved through shifting personalities and settings—provides the primary source of suspense.
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About the Author
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde and is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century.
Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he utilised. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism and his published letters.
Joyce was born in 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin—about half a mile from his mother's birthplace in Terenure—into a middle-class family on the way down. A brilliant student, he excelled at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father's alcoholism and unpredictable finances. He went on to attend University College Dublin.
In 1904, in his early twenties, Joyce emigrated permanently to continental Europe with his partner (and later wife) Nora Barnacle. They lived in Trieste, Paris and Zurich. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe centres on Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there. Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses, he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."