Finnegans Wake – Human and Nonhuman Histories

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 *
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