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 (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.

Richard Barlow is an Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and a former Academic Director of the Trieste Joyce School. His articles have appeared in Irish Studies Review, James Joyce Quarterly, Philosophy and Literature and Scottish Literary Review. He is the author of Modern Irish and Scottish Literature: Connections, Contrasts, Celticisms (2023) and The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture (2017).

Paul Fagan is an Irish Research Council fellow at Maynooth University. He is a co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society, a founding general editor of The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies, and an elected member of the International James Joyce Foundation Board of Trustees. Paul is the co-editor of Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (2021) and Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation (2021) as well as four edited volumes on Flann O’Brien. He is currently finalising monographs on ’Irish Literary Hoaxes’ and ’Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing, 1860s-1950s’.