Finnegans Wake – Human and Nonhuman Histories
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About this book
Explores the productive tension between historicist and nonhuman readings of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
- Features work from leading Joyce scholars
- Informed by a range of contemporary literary theories and approaches (nonhuman studies, new materialism, the Anthropocene, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, ecomedia studies, animal studies, the blue humanities, petroculture studies, climate change, genetic criticism)
- Contains chapters on Joyce’s engagement with the intersection of human and planetary issues in Finnegans Wake through the coordinates of state power, colonialism, gender, sexuality, religion, cultural production
- Suggests Finnegans Wake as a vital site for reflecting on literature’s role in addressing the crises of the Anthropocene and anthropogenic climate change in a twenty-first-century context
- Compares and contrasts the Wake’s depiction of human and nonhuman histories with other key intellectual movements and literary figures, including vitalist philosophy, Irish revivalism, avant-garde modernism, French realism, animal satire, psychology, music, Irish ballads and poetry
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.
Reviews
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.
Finnegans Wake: Human and Nonhuman Histories is a tremendously exciting book: a cross section of the state of play in a new wave of Joyce studies, one that reinstates work on Joyce at the forefront of critical studies of modernism. Reading these essays, one gets the sense that this new wave represents a real intellectual breakthrough, in which the full revolutionary scope of Joyce’s aesthetic project is at last being grasped and its radical simplicity at last being made tangible […] This collection is intellectually challenging in the best sense, a work for Joyceans but, more, for all modernists.
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.
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.
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.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction – Finnegans Wake: Joyce’s ‘cyclewheeling history’ of ‘our funnaminal world’
Richard Barlow and Paul Fagan
1. Fossils and Fossil Fuels: Nonhuman Energy and Decay in Finnegans Wake
Katherine Ebury
2. ‘The night of the Apophanypes’: Finnegans Wake and the Big Wind of 1839
Katherine O’Callaghan
3. River, Sea, Rain: Bodies of Water in ALP’s Soliloquy
Shinjini Chattopadhyay
4. Hydrofeminist Histories: The Phenomenology of Bodily Fluids in Finnegans Wake
Laura Gibbs
5. Finnegans Wake and the Irish Revival
Richard Barlow
6. ‘piously forged palimpsests’: Nonhuman Skins in Finnegans Wake
Paul Fagan
7. Becoming Wolf: The Nonhuman Life of Shem the Penman
Annalisa Volpone
8. Impossible Mourning in Finnegans Wake
Christopher DeVault
9. ‘Life… is a wake, livit or krikit’: Life – from a Nonhuman Perspective
Sam Slote
10. Finnegans Wake: Atomic
Ruben Borg
11. ‘singsigns to soundsense’: Music and the Nonhuman in Finnegans Wake
Michelle Witen
12. Crowdsourcing the Wake
Ronan Crowley
Bibliography
Index