Annotations to Finnegans Wake [Hardcover]

Professor Roland McHugh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1991 | ISBN-10: 0801842263 | ISBN-13: 978-0801842269 | Edition: Revised

The biggest stumbling block facing any prospective reader of "Finnegans Wake" is the book itself, with its thousands of words of Joyce's inventions, derived from nearly every foreign language imaginable and from a host of other sources. Now extensively revised, expanded, and corrected, Roland McHugh's "Annotations" is a unique one-volume guidebook designed to be read side by side with the "Wake" itself.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Unravels the mysteries of James Joyce." -- Herbert Mitgang, New York Times

About the Author

Roland McHugh has been studying Finnegans Wake since 1965. In 1973 he moved to Dublin with a view to understanding the book more completely and has lived there ever since. His book, The Sigla of "Finnegans Wake," was described by Clive Hart as "the best book on Finnegans Wake yet written."

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 648 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press; Revised edition (December 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801842263
• ISBN-13: 978-0801842269
• Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 7.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,768,785 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a succinct,useful, and functional assistant for "Wake-ing", October 1, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (honolulu, hawaii) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Hardcover)

"Annotations to Finnegans Wake" uses a simple format: matching the "Wake" page-for-page, placing glosses on the page at points corresponding to the passage annotated. So, if you're stumped by a passage in the middle of page ten, you merely glance at page ten in McHugh's volume at mid-page. McHugh combines this with a handful of "sigla" -- symbols or signs of basic concepts/themes central to the "Wake" (and used by Joyce himself in the book's composition...)(see McHugh's "Sigla of Finnegans Wake" [op] for a brief but enlightening treatise on this subject...). This, too, provides quick and ready deciphering.
Glosses are cogent but accurate and useful -- a minumum of bald speculation and "allusion chasing." This is a *great* reference work -- perhaps one of the two or three "indispensible" books for "Wake" studies, and a great springboard for focusing future study....

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, December 3, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Paperback)

Roland McHugh is an admirable Joyce scholar and most certainly knows more about the Wake than I, but I must say this book is not at all what I was looking for in an annotated guide. I was expecting the format of Ulysses Annotated, but instead was confronted with a very different mode of operation. McHugh's book is very useful in two areas, those being 1.)Foreign Words and 2.)Joyce's compound words. This is because the author presents the annotations as if they were personal notes in his own copy of the Wake, rather than full explications as found in Ulysses Annotated. McHugh argues that this will force the reader to make his own connections and lead to more frutiful conclusions, but the same goal could be accomplished by simply doing what McHugh has done, read FW, study it, and make notes of your own. Any beginner who is not familiar with some of the primary themes of the Wake will be sorely disappointed. The best example of the way McHugh skims over these is found in the preface (which I believe can be previewed on this site), where he shows how in a regular annotated guide a reference to Giambattista Vico would take up 9 lines of text, briefly explaining his theory, and in his own method it is simply referred to as 'Vico'. This reference would mean absolutely nothing to a reader unfamiliar with Vico. For a reader seeking to add a little convenience to their own personal study, this is perfect. For the reader seeking (relatively) full explanations of historical and literary allusions and such, this is most certainly not the guide to get. This book would have been exponentially more useful had it simply been integrated into the text of FW, ie one page of FW, one page of annotations.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A REFERENCE book, March 26, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Paperback)

This book is most helpful for pointing out the puns made in languages with which one is not familiar. It also helps with some of the historical and literary allusions. IT IS NOT A BOOK THAT IS A GUIDE TO READING FINNEGANS WAKE. That said, it is nevertheless invaluable as a reference book when reading the Wake.