Finnegans Wake

Description

The complete text of James Joyce's dream masterpiece, one of the great works of twentieth-century literature. This copyright edition incorporates Joyce's own alterations and corrections to the first printing in 1939.'Here words are not the polite contortions of twentieth-century printer's ink. They are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear.' Samuel Beckett

James Joyce (1882-1941) was born in Rathgar, Dublin. In 1904 he and Nora Barnacle (whom he married in 1931) left Ireland for Trieste. Abroad, free from the restrictions he felt in Ireland, Joyce felt compelled to write of his native land, producing Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man (1916). During World War I, he lived in Zurich from 1915 to 1919, and in 1920 moved to Paris, where he spent most of the rest of his life. Towards the end of December 1939 James Joyce and Nora Barnacle left Paris for a small village near Vichy and ultimately Zurich, where he died in January 1941. His major works, pioneering the 'stream of consciousness' style, are the novels Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).