Finnegans Wake – Human and Nonhuman Histories

a substantial and significant intervention into several fields of research [...] the editors aim to synthesise previous approaches to the study of Finnegans Wake in order to “offer Joyce studies, and new modernist and nonhuman studies more broadly, new directions for inquiry” […] They achieve that aim exceptionally well [...] The twelve essays collected in the book are both individually and cumulatively impressive […] an exemplary illustration of the need for recalibrated methodologies for literary analysis at a time of planetary ecological crisis. -- Patrick Lonergan, University of Galway * Irish Studies Review *
Fizzing with ideas, Finnegans Wake – Human and Nonhuman Histories, offers a revitalizing contribution to Wake studies. [...]this edited collection recuperates rich seams of environmental meaning embedded within the Wake. [...]Overall, this volume is a new, important reference for Finnegans Wake studies that galvanises a number of nonhuman and ecocritical approaches. -- Christopher Wogan, University of York * The Modernist Review *
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