19 Facts About Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce.

The prominent literary academic Harold Bloom called it Joyce's masterpiece, and, in The Western Canon, wrote that "if aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon, [Finnegans Wake] would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante".

The first signs of what would eventually become Finnegans Wake came in August 1923 when Joyce wrote the sketch "Here Comes Everybody", which dealt for the first time with the book's protagonist HCE.

The Jolases gave Joyce valuable encouragement and material support throughout the long process of writing Finnegans Wake, and published sections of the book in serial form in their literary magazine transition, under the title Work in Progress.

Finnegans Wake was published in book form, after seventeen years of composition, on 4 May 1939.

Related searches

Finnegans Wake is eventually freed, and goes once more into hiding.

Commentators who have summarised the plot of Finnegans Wake include Joseph Campbell, John Gordon, Anthony Burgess, William York Tindall, and Philip Kitcher.

Joseph Campbell, in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, believed Earwicker to be the dreamer, but considered the narrative to be the observances of, and a running commentary by, an anonymous pedant on Earwicker's dream in progress, who would interrupt the flow with his own digressions.

Finnegans Wake is possessed of a musical voice and is a braggart.

Finnegans Wake is not happy in his work, which is that of a messenger or a postman; he would rather be a priest.

Vico's name appears a number of times throughout the Finnegans Wake, indicating the work's debt to his theories, such as "The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin".

But, given the flexibility of allusion in Finnegans Wake HCE assumes the character of Pigott as well, for just as HCE betrays himself to the cad, Pigott betrayed himself at the inquiry into admitting the forgery by his spelling of the word "hesitancy" as "hesitency"; and this misspelling appears frequently in the Wake.

Finnegans Wake makes a great number of allusions to religious texts.

Finnegans Wake was looking for puns and unusual associations across the barriers of language, a practice Bull well understood.

An extreme example of the Finnegans Wake's language are a series of ten one-hundred letter words spread throughout the text .

In 1962, Clive Hart wrote the first major book-length study of the work since Campbell's Skeleton Key, Structure and Motif in "Finnegans Wake" which approached the work from the increasingly influential field of structuralism.

Joyce continued to revise all previously published sections until Finnegans Wake's final published form, resulting in the text existing in a number of different forms, to the point that critics can speak of Finnegans Wake being a different entity to Work in Progress.

Parts of the book were adapted for the stage by Mary Manning as Passages from Finnegans Wake, which was in turn used as the basis for a film of the novel by Mary Ellen Bute.

Finnegans Wake is a difficult text, and Joyce did not aim it at the general reader.