Finnegans Wake – Human and Nonhuman Histories

Richard Barlow is an Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University and a former Academic Director of the Trieste Joyce School. He is the author of The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture (2017) and Modern Irish and Scottish Literature: Connections, Contrasts, Celticisms (2023). 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'.

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsNotes on ContributorsIntroduction – Finnegans Wake: Joyce’s ‘cyclewheeling history’ of ‘our funnaminal world’Richard Barlow and Paul Fagan1. Fossils and Fossil Fuels: Nonhuman Energy and Decay in Finnegans WakeKatherine Ebury2. ‘The night of the Apophanypes’: Finnegans Wake and the Big Wind of 1839Katherine O’Callaghan3. River, Sea, Rain: Bodies of Water in ALP’s SoliloquyShinjini Chattopadhyay4. Hydrofeminist Histories: The Phenomenology of Bodily Fluids in Finnegans WakeLaura Gibbs5. Finnegans Wake and the Irish RevivalRichard Barlow6. ‘piously forged palimpsests’: Nonhuman Skins in Finnegans WakePaul Fagan7. Becoming Wolf: The Nonhuman Life of Shem the PenmanAnnalisa Volpone8. Impossible Mourning in Finnegans WakeChristopher DeVault9. ‘Life… is a wake, livit or krikit’: Life – from a Nonhuman PerspectiveSam Slote10. Finnegans Wake: AtomicRuben Borg11. ‘singsigns to soundsense’: Music and the Nonhuman in Finnegans WakeMichelle Witen12. Crowdsourcing the WakeRonan CrowleyBibliographyIndex

a substantial and significant intervention into several fields of research [...] the editors aim to synthesise previous approaches to the study of Finnegans Wake in order to “offer Joyce studies, and new modernist and nonhuman studies more broadly, new directions for inquiry” […] They achieve that aim exceptionally well [...] The twelve essays collected in the book are both individually and cumulatively impressive […] an exemplary illustration of the need for recalibrated methodologies for literary analysis at a time of planetary ecological crisis.