A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
Cutchogue: Buccaneer Books, 1976.
Hardcover. 8 3/4" X 5 3/4". 297pp. Very mild shelf wear to covers, corners, and edges of gray cloth over boards. Previous owners' stamp and name in ink to front free end paper. Inked underlining and notation to first 40 pages, with particualrly heavy notation to copyright page. Binding is firm and sound.
ABOUT THIS BOOK:
Countless would-be readers of Finnegans Wake — James Joyce’s 1939 masterwork, on which he labored for a third of his life — have given up after a few pages and “dismissed the book as a perverse triumph of the unintelligible.” In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with novelist and poet Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first guide to understanding the fascinating world of Finnegans Wake. Page by page, chapter by chapter, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake outlines the basic action of Joyce’s book, simplifies and clarifies the complex web of images and allusions, and provides an understandable, continuous narrative from which the reader can venture out on his or her own. This edition includes a foreword and updates by Joyce scholar Dr. Edmund L. Epstein that add the context of sixty subsequent years of scholarship.(Publisher). Good +. Item #6939
Price: $40.00