Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake is held to be the most difficult major novel in the English language, a work that took James Joyce seventeen years to compose. Its revolutionary cyclical dream language dismantles the boundaries between languages, histories, and states of consciousness, creating a text that operates simultaneously on countless levels of meaning. The novel represents the furthest reach of literary experimentation in the twentieth century.

Inspired by Giambattista Vico's theory of cyclical history, Finnegans Wake reimagines the entirety of human experience as a single night's dream, looping endlessly from its final sentence back to its opening fragment. The work has engaged some of the most adventurous minds in literary theory and philosophy, notably Jacques Derrida, and remains a basis of experimental literature.