Finnegans Wake

✍ Scribed by James Joyce

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Year: 1939
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 583 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 014191162X

✦ Synopsis

Kindle Edition, 642 pages
Published 1939
Introduction by: Seamus Deane
Penguin Modern Classics (2015)

Follows a man's thoughts and dreams during a single night. It is also a book that participates in the re-reading of Irish history that was part of the revival of the early 20th century. The author also wrote "Ulysses", "Dubliners" and "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man".
A story with no real beginning or end (it ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence), this "book of Doublends Jined" is as remarkable for its prose as for its circular structure.

Written in a fantastic dream-language, forged from polyglot puns and portmanteau words, the Wake features some of Joyce's most hilarious characters: the Irish barkeep Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Anna Livia Plurabelle.

Joyce's final work, Finnegan's Wake is his masterpiece of the night as Ulysses is of the day. Supreme linguistic virtuosity conjures up the dark underground worlds of sexuality and dream. Joyce undermines traditional storytelling and all official forms of English and confronts the different kinds of betrayal - cultural, political and sexual - that he saw at the heart of Irish history. Dazzlingly inventive, with passages of great lyrical beauty and humour, Finnegans Wake remains one of the most remarkable works of the twentieth century.

A daring work of experimental, Modernist genius, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century, and the crowning glory of Joyce's life.

'An extraordinary performance, a transcription into a miniaturized form of the whole western literary tradition'
Seamus Deane

The text is that of the first edition of Finnegans Wake published by Faber and Faber, London, and The Viking Press, New York, 4 May 1939