Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations
Language and Meaning in Finnegans Wake

Boldrini examines how Dante's literary and linguistic theories helped shape Joyce's radical narrative techniques.

Lucia Boldrini (Author)

9780521792769, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 March 2001

246 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.53 kg

"Her effort to describe the language in Finnegan's Wake deserves to be read by every student of Joyce and by those who are interested in how the medieval world was retrieved by the modernists as a source of influence and inspiration." James Joyce Quarterly

Lucia Boldrini's study examines how the literary and linguistic theories of Dante's Divine Comedy helped shape the radical narrative techniques of Joyce's last novel, Finnegans Wake. Through detailed parallel readings, she explores a range of connections: issues such as the question of Babel, literary creation as excrement, the complex relations between literary, geometrical and female forms. Boldrini places Joyce's work in the wider context of other modernist writing's relation to Dante, thereby identifying the distinctness of Joyce's own project. She considers how theories of influence and intertextuality help or limit the understanding of the relation. Boldrini shows how, through an untiring confrontation with his predecessors, constantly thematised within his writing, Joyce develops a 'poetics in progress' that informs not only his final work but his entire oeuvre. This book will appeal to scholars and students interested in Joyce, Dante, and questions of literary relations.

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: in the wake of the divine comic
Prelude: 'Bethicket me' or, how to find the straight way in the wood of Samuel Beckett's Obliquity of Examination
1. Working in layers
2. The confusioning of human races
3. Distilling vulgar matter
4. Figures of ineffability
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literary theory [DSA]