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.

Animal Satire presents a cultural history of animal satire, a critically neglected but persistent presence in the history of cultural production, in which animals expose human folly while the strategies of satire expose the folly of human-animal relations. Highlighting the teeming animal presences across the history of satirical expression from Aristophanes to Twitter, with chapters on key works of literature, drama, film, and a plethora of satirical media, Animal Satire reveals the rich rhetorical significance of animality in powering the politics of satire from ancient and medieval through modern and contemporary times. More pressingly, the book makes the case for the significance of satire for understanding the real-world implications of rhetoric about animals in ongoing struggles for justice. By gathering both critical and creative examples from representative media forms, historical periods, and continents, this volume aims to enrich scholarship on the history of satire as well as empower creative practitioners with ideas about its practical applications today.

Time, Literature and Cartography after the Spatial Turn argues that the spatial turn in literary studies has the unexplored potential to reinvigorate the ways in which we understand time in literature. Drawing on new readings of time in a range of literary narratives, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Adam Barrows explores literature’s ability to cartographically represent the dense and tangled rhythmic processes that constitute lived spaces. Applying the insights of ecological resilience studies, as well as Henri Lefebvre’s late work on rhythm to literary representations of time, this book offers a sustained examination of literature’s “chronometric imaginary”: its capacity to map the temporal relationships between the human and the non-human, the local and the global.

In this book—one of the first ecocritical explorations of Irish literature—Alison Lacivita defies the popular view of James Joyce as a thoroughly urban writer by bringing to light his consistent engagement with nature. Using genetic criticism to investigate Joyce’s source texts, notebooks, and proofs, Lacivita shows how Joyce developed ecological themes in Finnegans Wake over successive drafts. Making apparent a love of growing things and a lively connection with the natural world across his texts, Lacivita’s approach reveals Joyce’s keen attention to the Irish landscape, meteorology, urban planning, Dublin’s ecology, the exploitation of nature, and fertility and reproduction. Alison Lacivita unearths a vital quality of Joyce’s work that has largely gone undetected, decisively aligning ecocriticism with both modernism and Irish studies.

All fifteen essays in this collection are concerned with the primacy of the novelistic aspects of Ulysses and how it achieves its meanings. Together they seek to redress the tendency of some recent critics to regard Ulysses as a compendium of techniques or a treatise.

Len Platt charts a fresh approach through one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century literature. Using original archival research and detailed close readings, he outlines Joyce's literary response to the racial discourse of twentieth-century politics. Platt's account is the first to position Finnegans Wake in precise historical conditions and to explore Joyce's engagement with European fascism. Race, Platt claims, is a central theme for Joyce, both in terms of the colonial and post-colonial conflicts between the Irish and the British, and in terms of its use by the extreme right. It is in this context that Joyce's engagement with race, while certainly a product of colonial relations, also figures as a wider disputation with rationalism, capitalism and modernity.

Flann O'Brien: Acting out is the first full-length study to comprehensively address the themes of performance, masking and illusion in the author's fiction, columns, correspondence and scripts. These essays reveal, for the first time, the fullness of O'Brien's literary engagements with diverse theatrical movements (melodrama, revivalism, tableaux vivant, Grand Guignol, modernist anti-theatre) and playwrights (Shakespeare, Goethe, Boucicault, Synge, Yeats, Gregory, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Čapek). Often considered a lonely pioneer of the Irish novel, the author is here resituated both among a troupe of mid-century playwrights, producers and performers (mac Liammoír, Edwards, Saroyan, Montgomery, Sheridan, MacNamara, O'Dea) and in front of discrete local audiences (at The Irish Times, the Abbey, the Gate, Radio Éireann, Telefís Éireann). A new picture of O'Brien emerges as a performative and collaborative writer, firmly imbedded in the cultural networks and institutions of his time and place. Flann O'Brien: Acting out draws unprecedented attention to the author's critically neglected writing for stage and screen (Thirst, Faustus Kelly, Rhapsody in Stephen's Green, An Sgian, The Handsome Carvers, Mairéad Gillan, The Dead Spit of Kelly). These scripts are here reevaluated against their historical contexts and through their thematics of war, nationalism, gender, nonhuman bodies and posthuman identity. At the same time, innovative readings of the role of masking and mimicry in the fiction and columns (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, 'John Duffy's Brother', 'The Martyr's Crown', Cruiskeen Lawn) shed new critical light on O'Brien's pseudonyms, his theories of literary performance, his modulation of comic and tragic tone, and his shifting place in Irish modernism.