Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Hardcover)

~ Professor Roland McHugh (Author)
Key Phrases: urbis felicitas, pura bella, western reservoirs, Humpty Dumpty, Egyptian Book of the Dead, Lewis Carroll (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

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

Product Description

Long considered the essential guide to Joyce's famously difficult work, Roland McHugh's Annotations to "Finnegans Wake" provides both novice readers and seasoned Joyceans with a wealth of information in an easy-to-use format uniquely suited to this densely layered text. Each page of the Annotations corresponds directly with a page of the standard Viking/Penguin edition of Finnegans Wake and contains line-by-line notes following the placement of the passages to which they refer. The reader can thus look directly from text to notes and back again, with no need to consult separate glossaries or other listings.

McHugh's richly detailed notes distill decades of scholarship, explicating foreign words, unusual English connotations and colloquial expressions, place names, historical events, song titles and quotations, parodies of other texts, and Joyce's diverse literary and popular sources. The third edition has added material reflecting fifteen years of research, including significant new insights from Joyce's compositional notebooks (the "Buffalo Notebooks"), now being edited for the first time.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

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 (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,031,488 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 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

"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....

13 of 13 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.

18 of 20 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.