James Joyce, the Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo - VI.B.16 (Hardcover, Annotated edition)

Joyce's notebooks provide a detailed, though indirect, record of a substantial period in the working life of one of Europe's greatest writers. From 1922, when he finished "Ulysses, to the publication of "Finnegans Wake in 1939, Joyce wrote and rewrote continuously, expanding, refining and enriching his "Work in Progress. He did not begin with a master plan; rather he gradually evolved his text out of an extraordinarily diverse corpus of materials collected in the notebooks. These notebooks provide not only a fascinating body of material that can help to interpret a notoriously complex text but they also furnish a detailed map of Joyce's creative engagement during the whole period of the work's development. The raw notebook material derives from an encyclopedic range of external sources--hundred of books, pamphlets, and articles in journals and newspapers. The identification of this source material is crucial to understanding, and often simply deciphering, the notes themselves; but this process has been rendered especially difficult because Joyce rarely, if ever, indicates where he found his material. These notebooks will be published as a series of fascicles, one per authorial notebook, three per scribal notebook, fifty-five in all. The editorial aim is to bring together all of the information relevant to each note in as concise and simple a way as possible. They will provide a reference library of comprehensively quoted source material--in effect an annotated digest of Joyce's working library--which will serve as a new starting point not just for exegesis of "Finnegans Wake, but also for biographical, textual, and literary criticism of Joyce. Furthermore, the "Edition will allow for areconstruction of Joyce's intellectual concerns and compositional habits during the drafting of "Work in Progress / Finnegans Wake.