FINNEGANS WAKE

by Joyce James

$20,350 · Offered by Biblio

First edition · Signed

London: Faber and Faber, 1939. First Edition, First Issue, Signed by James Joyce and limited to 425 copies only, of which this is number 341. 8vo, publisher’s original red buckram lettered in gilt on spine, t.e.g., other edges untrimmed. Yellow cloth slipcase expertly re-created as the original. 628. A fine copy, very handsome, bright and clean, very well preserved and without wear. The slipcase in beautiful condition. IMPORTANT FIRST EDITION SIGNED BY JAMES JOYCE. A very desirable copy of this, the best and scarcest issue of the first editions. No book has ever been more ambitiously conceived than Joyce’s FINNEGAN'S WAKE. If ULYSSES represents the pinnacle of the Modernist movement, FINNEGAN'S WAKE is a step beyond; it stands in the same relation to ULYSSES as ULYSSES does to A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST....—an extension which is also a completely new conception. Joyce envisioned the book as nothing less than a "history of the world." Seventeen years in the writing, and composed in a sort of meta-language--"an Esperanto for the art of fiction"--it stands as a unique monument to language and literature and the modern age. Slocum and Calhoun A49; Bradbury, The Modern World, 157-176. About this work, he stated “‘I might easily have written this story in the traditional manner. Every novelist knows the recipe...But I, after all, am trying to tell the story of this Chapelizod family in a new way. Time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of my book... I am trying to bui

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Year: 1939
• Edition: First Edition
• Binding: hardcover

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