WANDERING AND RETURN IN FINNEGANS WAKE

Guiding readers through the disorienting dreamworld of James Joyces last work, Kimberly Devlin examines Finnegans Wake as an uncanny text, one that is both strange and familiar. In light of Freuds description of the uncanny as a haunting awareness of earlier, repressed phases of the self, Devlin finds the uncanniness of the Wake rooted in Joyces rewritings of literary fictions from his earlier artistic periods. She demonstrates the notion of psychological return as she traces the obsessions, scenarios, and images from Joyces waking fictions that resurface in his final dreamtext in uncanny forms, transformed yet discernible, often to uncover hidden, unconscious truths. Drawing on psychoanalytic arguments and recent feminist theory, Devlin maps intertextual connections that reveal many of Joyces most deeply felt imaginative and intellectual concerns, such as the self in its decentered relationship to language, the elusive nature of human identity, the anxieties implicit in mortal selfhood, the male subject in its opposition to the female sexual other. She suggests that the Wake records Joyces implicit interest in the psychological counterpart to Vicos theory of historical repetition: Freuds theory of the insistent internal return of earlier narratives.Originally published in 1991.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.