Finnegans Wake – Human and Nonhuman Histories

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 such as colonialism, the Irish Revival, the Free State's energy policies, and the invention of television. These contexts spotlight enlightening nonhuman themes in Joyce's circular history, including bogs, storms, rivers, bodily fluids, skin, wolves, mourning, DNA, atoms, labour, and 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.