Finnegans Wake – Human and Nonhuman Histories

• Features work from leading Joyce scholars
• Informed by a range of contemporary literary theories and approaches (nonhuman studies, new materialism, the Anthropocene, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, ecomedia studies, animal studies, the blue humanities, petroculture studies, climate change, genetic criticism)
• Contains chapters on Joyce’s engagement with the intersection of human and planetary issues in Finnegans Wake through the coordinates of state power, colonialism, gender, sexuality, religion, cultural production
• Suggests Finnegans Wake as a vital site for reflecting on literature’s role in addressing the crises of the Anthropocene and anthropogenic climate change in a twenty-first-century context
• Compares and contrasts the Wake’s depiction of human and nonhuman histories with other key intellectual movements and literary figures, including vitalist philosophy, Irish revivalism, avant-garde modernism, French realism, animal satire, psychology, music, Irish ballads and poetry

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.