Finnegans Wake Human and Nonhuman Histories opens new ground by exploring the productive tension between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric readings of James Joyces 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 volumes focus allows the contributors to read the Wakes nonhuman imaginary in original, often surprising comparative contexts (colonialism, the Irish Revival, the Free States energy policies, the invention of television) and to spotlight enlightening nonhuman themes in Joyces 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.
Explores the productive tension between historicist and nonhuman readings of James Joyces Finnegans Wake
