JOYCE, James - BECKETT, Samuel, and others.

£500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

An Exagmination, Analyses of the "Work in Progress". First edition of this early critique of Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake. It was published 10 years before the publication of the finished novel to raise funds for the ever impecunious Joyce. The first article, "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce", was Samuel Beckett's first appearance in print. The two "Letters of Protest" negatively criticise Joyce's "Work in Progress", and were included at his request. It was rumoured that Joyce had written one of these critical essays himself. This was debunked in 1979 when an academic discovered a cache of letters and books belonging to Vladimir Dixon, a minor Russian poet who lived in France during the 1920s. The publishers later sold sheets of this edition to Faber & Faber in London and New Directions in New York, who reissued them with inserted title pages.

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