Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

* Illustrated
* Author Biography
* Interactive Table of Contents

Finnegans Wake is a work of comic prose by Irish writer James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's death, Finnegans Wake was Joyce's final work. The entire book is written in a largelyidiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteauwords, which many critics believe attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. Owing to the work's expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and its abandonment of the conventions of plot and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public.