James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is an iconic text of 20th-century literature, an avant-garde epic that has inspired experimental work in such diverse fields as music, art, philosophy, and film. Finn Fordham's critical introduction looks at how it was written and asks what this can tell us about the hundreds of things it seems to be about.

This book is a critical introduction to Finnegans Wake and its genesis. Finn Fordham provides a survey of critical, scholarly, and theoretical approaches to Joyce's iconic masterpiece. He also analyses in detail the compositional development of certain key passages which describe the artist (Shem) and his project; the river-mother (ALP) and her 'first kiss'; the Oedipal shooting of the universal father (HCE) by the priestly son (Shaun); and the bewitching and curious daughter (Issy). His analyses demonstrate 'genetic' ways of reading the text which illustrate its immense range and playfulness and how these qualities were generated in composition. As well as opening up the densely detailed textuality of the Wake in all its multiplicity, Fordham argues for a relation between the way the text was formed and key aspects of its thematic content: an uprising of particularity and detail against universality, absolutes, and generality. He shows that the proliferation of individuated textual details overwhelms any unitary concept to the text. And this reflects an idealized and utopian uprising as it overcomes centralizing singularity: Finnegans do wake up. As part of this argument he proposes a qualified return to a notion of character - qualified in that characters can be understood in part as reflecting the character of compositional techniques: self-criticism and concealment, expansion and growth, flow and reflection, transferral and transformation. The character of the text's composition as a whole can be, paradoxically, summed up in the force of individuated multitudes: in the people, male and female, young and old, combining to overwhelm syntactic uniformity and singular signification. Quotations from the works of James Joyce reproduced with permission of the Estate of James Joyce, © Estate of James Joyce. We regret that acknowledgement to the James Joyce Estate for permission to include material by James Joyce was not included in the first printing of this book.

"Finnegans Wake" is the most deliberately obscure and difficult work in literature. Readers are over their heads and struggling for shore by the second sentence. The "Wake" is often described as unreadable, and that's not entirely unfair given the book's setting in the dark night of the subconscious and dreams where strange shapes shift and merge in a multitude of motifs and the fact that it's written in mixture of many of the world's languages now known as Wakese. "Finnegans Wake" refers to itself as a "nightmaze," something readers translate as nightmare. But what seems at first sight as meaningless, actually has more meanings than can be imagined, and what appears as unreadable requires only a radically new look at what words can be made to do. "Riverrun to Livvy" is a literary layman's attempt to enlighten Joyce's "book of the dark" for a wider audience, inviting those who want to be "well letterread" on a journey into the twilight zone of literature. The first page of "Finnegans Wake" has been compared to the first second of the Big Bang, containing as it does all the elemental materials that compose the complete creation. Through a close reading of the "Wake's" first page, "Riverrun to Livvy" prepares readers to tackle the remaining 627 pages with a greater degree of insight and understanding. It's been said that no one can be considered truly educated without having read at least one page of "Finnegans Wake." "Riverrun to LIvvy" dares readers not only to pick up the gauntlet by reading one page but to boldly go where few readers have gone before, all the way through literature's most terrifying text.

Since its publication in 1939, countless would-be readers of "Finnegans Wake" - James Joyce's masterwork, which consumed a third of his life - have given up after a few pages, dismissing it as a "perverse triumph of the unintelligible." In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first "key" or guide to entering the fascinating, disturbing, marvelously rich world of "Finnegans Wake." The authors break down Joyce's "unintelligible" book page by page, stripping the text of much of its obscurity and serving up thoughtful interpretations via footnotes and bracketed commentary. They outline the book's basic action, and then simplify -- and clarify -- its complex web of images and allusions. "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake" is the latest addition to the "Collected Works of Joseph Campbell" series.

“Joyce’s Book of the Dark gives us such a blend of exciting intelligence and impressive erudition that it will surely become established as one of the most fascinating and readable Finnegans Wake studies now available.”—Margot Norris, James Joyce Literary Supplement

The biggest stumbling block facing any prospective reader of "Finnegans Wake" is the book itself, with its thousands of words of Joyce's inventions, derived from nearly every foreign language imaginable and from a host of other sources. Now extensively revised, expanded, and corrected, Roland McHugh's "Annotations" is a unique one-volume guidebook designed to be read side by side with the "Wake" itself.