Finnegans Wake - Human and Nonhuman Histories - by Richard Barlow & Paul Fagan

About the Book

Explores the productive tension between historicist and nonhuman readings of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

Book Synopsis

Finnegans Wake - Human and Nonhuman Histories opens new ground by exploring the productive tension between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric readings of James Joyce's final modernist masterpiece. Drawing on the most up-to-date theories and methodologies (the Anthropocene, new materialism, petroculture studies, the blue humanities, animal studies, ecofeminism, ecomedia), twelve leading Joyce scholars offer valuable new insights into the interwoven historical and planetary dimensions of Finnegans Wake. The volume's focus allows the contributors to read the Wake's nonhuman imaginary in original, often surprising comparative contexts (colonialism, the Irish Revival, the Free State's energy policies, the invention of television) and to spotlight enlightening nonhuman themes in Joyce's circular history (bogs, storms, rivers, bodily fluids, skin, wolves, mourning, DNA, atoms, labour, music). As these chapters show, a century later, Finnegans Wake remains a vibrant and vital text in which to interrogate the limits, exploitations and common plight of human and nonhuman life in the 21st-century.

Review Quotes

An apt combination of text, topic, and contributors. With verve and urgency, these essay writers take up the discourses of new materialism, animal studies, ecocriticism, and genetics, as well as physics, historicism, feminism, and psychoanalysis, to draw out the interconnectedness of the human and the nonhuman in the Wake.--Catherine Flynn, University of California, Berkeley

This edited collection kindles anew a sense of awe at the extraordinary, totalising energies of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and the multitude of worlds the novel evokes within, as well as keen admiration for the deft sophistication with which its contributors elucidate the multiplicitous dimensions of Joyce's imagination of the "cyclewheeling history" of "our funanimal world". The volume's essays are as effervescent as the nonhuman lives and objects depicted in the Wake's prose[...] Collectively, the contributors dynamically evoke the way in which the novel layers, merges, inverts, or subverts human and nonhuman perspectives, in a textual method that is not binary in its pairing of oppositions, but rather palimpsestic, accretive and multi-scalar.--Sharae Deckard, University College Dublin "Estudios Irlandeses"