In the first full-length study of Joyce's direct and indirect use of alchemical allusions, DiBernard shows how an awareness of the alchemical metaphor guides a reader through the richness of Finnegans Wake. For example, the alchemical transmutation of lead into gold parallels the transmutation of the dross and commotion of ordinary life into a work of art. This study shows how the themes of Joyce's novel—death and rebirth, the conflict between physical and spiritual, incest, colors, forgery, and the reconciliation of opposites—relate to the alchemical process. The author then presents a theory, based on alchemical metaphor, on the much debated subject of Joyce's view of the artist.

In the first full-length study of Joyce's direct and indirect use of alchemical allusions, DiBernard shows how an awareness of the alchemical metaphor guides a reader through the richness of Finnegans Wake. For example, the alchemical transmutation of lead into gold parallels the transmutation of the dross and commotion of ordinary life into a work of art. This study shows how the themes of Joyce's novel--death and rebirth, the conflict between physical and spiritual, incest, colors, forgery, and the reconciliation of opposites--relate to the alchemical process. The author then presents a theory, based on alchemical metaphor, on the much debated subject of Joyce's view of the artist.

Since its publication in 1939, countless would-be readers of "Finnegans Wake" - James Joyce's masterwork, which consumed a third of his life - have given up after a few pages, dismissing it as a "perverse triumph of the unintelligible." In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first "key" or guide to entering the fascinating, disturbing, marvelously rich world of "Finnegans Wake." The authors break down Joyce's "unintelligible" book page by page, stripping the text of much of its obscurity and serving up thoughtful interpretations via footnotes and bracketed commentary. They outline the book's basic action, and then simplify -- and clarify -- its complex web of images and allusions. "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake" is the latest addition to the "Collected Works of Joseph Campbell" series.

In Chapelizod, a suburb of Dublin, an innkeeper and his family are sleeping. Around them and their dreams there swirls a vortex of world history, of ambition and failure, desire and transgression, pride and shame, rivalry and conflict, gossip and mystery.

Finnegans Wake has been the target of peripheral investigation for more than forty years, starting with early studies of this novel as a "work in progress." Just now, however, are studies beginning to appear in which the book's basic plot and theme are closely examined. Of these new studies, there is no doubt that Margaret C. Solomon's close examination of the sexual universe created here by Joyce will prove especially illumi­nating to both scholars and general readers. In closely reasoned and richly detailed chapters in the three major parts of her book Mrs. Solomon examines indi­vidually the enigmatic figures, reveals the meanings of the passages or chapters which they have made hitherto obscure, and weaves them together to form a distinct pattern of sexual analogies. In Part 3, perhaps the most significant for future students of Joyce, the author, supported by the discoveries of the first two parts, examines the number-symbolism that obviously and enigmatically pervades the Wake. Her final chapter, "The Coach with the Sex Insides," which brings to a climax her brilliant description of Joyce's sexual universe, examines the dreamer, Yawn, and the image of the bridal ship of Tristan and Isolde and reveals man-as-universe in the shape of a tesseract, a geometrical figure realizable only in a four-dimensional continuum.

Essays on Irish theatre in the second half of the twentieth century

Revival, reinvention, and regeneration: the concept of renascence pervades Joyce’s work through the inescapable presence of his literary forebears. By persistently reexamining tradition, reinterpreting his literary heritage in light of the present, and translating and re-translating from one system of signs to another, Joyce exhibits the spirit of the greatest of Renaissance writers and artists. In fact, his writing derives some of its most important characteristics from Renaissance authors, as this collection of essays shows. Though critical work has often focused on Joyce's relationship to medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Dante, Renascent Joyce examines Joyce's connection to the Renaissance in such figures as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Bruno. Joyce's own writing can itself be viewed through the rubric of renascence with the tools of genetic criticism and the many insights afforded by the translation process. Several essays in this volume examine this broader idea, investigating the rebirth and reinterpretation of Joyce's texts. Topics include literary historiography, Joyce's early twentieth-century French cultural contexts, and the French translation of Ulysses. Attentive to the current state of Joyce studies, the writers of these extensively researched essays investigate the Renaissance spirit in Joyce to offer a volume at once historically informed and innovative.