Joyce and the Invention of Irish History
Finnegans Wake in Context

This book examines Joyce's use of historical sources to illuminate prevalent problems central to modern Irish identity.

Thomas C. Hofheinz (Author)

9780521471145, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 May 1995

216 pages
23.6 x 16 x 1.7 cm, 0.44 kg

"In an essay that achieves an admirable balance between theoretical, historical and interpretive material, Hofheinz argues for a reading of Joyce's novel as 'a cipher for the modern Irish historical predicament'....The result is a reading of Finnegans Wake that is both dazzling and informative...a reading of Finnegans Wake that is both dazzling and informative, and among the finest expositions of Vico's importance to Joyce...I know. " Journal of English and Germanic Philology

This incisive study of James Joyce's work examines Finnegans Wake as a narrative response to acute problems of historical experience, especially issues of modern Irish identity implicit in historical writing about Ireland. Thomas C. Hofheinz shows how Joyce's narrative simulations of such problems enabled him to form startling linkages between public and private, objective and subjective Irish history. Hofheinz investigates Joyce's illumination of a wide range of issues - social, cultural, familial, psychological - by comparing Finnegans Wake with traditions of modern Irish historicism and historiography, including Ireland's place in the Catholic providential history of Vico's New Science; and he trenchantly challenges cultural-material methods of interpreting Joyce's historical 'subject', countering them with a reader-response philosophy owing much to the hermeneutics of Gadamer, Iser, and Ricoeur.

Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
1. Introduction: the subject of Ireland in Finnegans Wake
2. Conditions for historical study of Finnegans Wake
3. Naming and claiming: Irish topological history and Finnegans Wake
4. The annals of themselves: Irish historical writing and Joyce's primal patriarchy
5. Vico, natural law philosophy, and Joyce's Ireland
6. Unfolding the map
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]