Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations: Language and Meaning in Finnegans Wake

Description

Lucia Boldrini's study examines how the literary and linguistic theories of Dante's Divine Comedy helped shape the radical narrative techniques of Joyce's last novel Finnegans Wake. Through detailed parallel readings, she explores a range of connections: issues such as the question of Babel, literary creation as excrement, the complex relations between literary, geometrical and female forms. Boldrini places Joyce's work in the wider context of other modernist writing's relation to Dante, thereby identifying the distinctness of Joyce's own project. She considers how theories of influence and intertextuality help or limit the understanding of the relation. Boldrini shows how, through an untiring confrontation with his predecessors, constantly thematised within his writing, Joyce develops a 'poetics in progress' that informs not only his final work but his entire oeuvre. This book will appeal to scholars and students interested in Joyce, Dante, and questions of literary relations.

Lucia Boldrini is lecturer in English at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

"Her ability to tackle seemingly baffling and insurmountable textual conundrums in both Dante and Joyce is remarkable. Moreover, she bypasses the set ways of discussing influence and intertextuality in order to offer fresh and invigorating readings of literary relations." Jennifer Frazer, James Joyce Literary Supplement "The book's scope...is broad enough to warrant the attention of readers interested in both authors, as well as in theoretical questions of relations between and among texts [...] Seamless." The Comparatist "Her effort to describe the language in Finnegan's Wake deserves to be read by every student of Joyce and by those who are interested in how the medieval world was retrieved by the modernists as a source of influence and inspiration." James Joyce Quarterly