Finnegans Wake is a book by Irish writer James Joyce. It is significant for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works in the Western canon. Joyce was so exhausted that he did not write a line of prose for a year.
About Finnegans Wake in brief
Finnegans Wake is a book by Irish writer James Joyce. It is significant for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works in the Western canon. The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, which blends standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words to unique effect. The book discusses, in an unorthodox fashion, the Earwicker family, comprising the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy. The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book’s unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle. The now commonplace term quark – a subatomic particle – originates from Finneganswake. The work has since come to assume a preeminent place in English literature. It has been called a work of fiction which combines a body of fables… with the work of analysis and deconstruction\”. : 210–211 It was published in its entirety on 4 May 1939, but remains largely unread by the general public. Joyce was so exhausted that he did not write a line of prose for a year. The first signs of what would eventually become Finnegan’s Wake came in August 1923 when Joyce wrote the sketch the first time he felt that he had obviously felt any word that he wanted to use. Over the next few years, Joyce’s method of obsessional note-taking became one ofincreasingly obsessional concern with any word he felt he had to write.
He wrote two pages in 1923, the first I have since the final Yes of Ulysses, concerning the historic last king of Ireland cleaning up after guests by drinking the dregs of their dirty glasses. Joyce completed another four short sketches in July and August 1923, while holidaying in Bognor, which dealt with different aspects of Irish history, commonly known as Saint Patrick and the Druid. These sketches would eventually be incorporated into one form or another in one form, but they did not contain any main characters or points which would later come to constitute the backbone of theBook. The actual title of the work remained a secret until the book was published. Initial reaction to the book, both in its serialized and final published form, was largely negative, ranging from bafflement at its radical reworking of the English language to open hostility towards its lack of respect for the conventions of the genre. If aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon, would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante, wrote Harold Bloom. The prominent literary academic Harold Bloom has called it Joyce’s masterpiece, and, in The Western Canon, wrote that it would be “a great comic vision, that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page” The book’s central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot, but key details remain elusive.
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This page is based on the article Finnegans Wake published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 09, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
