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Product Description
Review
Unravels the mysteries of James Joyce.
(New York Times 2006)A daunting and delightful book.
(Modern Fiction Studies 2007)All readers who contemplate any exegetical move whatsoever in the Wake must put the revised Annotations on the top of their pile of reference books.
(James Joyce Quarterly )I don't think we still have readers such as Roland McHugh who read the Wake without any help: most novices read the Wake in one hand and McHugh's Annotations in the other.
(A Collideorscape of Joyce )It is hard to think of any reader of Finnegans Wake who would not have Roland McHugh's Annotations... on his desk.
(Win Van Mierlo James Joyce Literary Supplement )McHugh remains admirable for his collection.
(Tim Conley James Joyce Quarterly )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.
(1992)
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
26 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I caught Finnegans Wake (FW) dependency from one of Roland's other books (The Finnegans Wake Experience - still the most infectious intro), and it is only fair that he has stitched a line by line annotation together which has helped me with my addiction. This book is wonderfully suggestive: each page matches FW page by page, but with annotations or correspondances or translations or references instead of the FW text. So, you get a map instead of the landscape itself. (Don't buy this thinking that you can read it on the tube into work). I think the best way to use this book is WITH FINNEGANS WAKE! . So: (a) have a basic understanding of FW (e.g. read Seamus Dean's or Anthony Burgess's excellent introduction); (b) skim a chapter of FW very quickly (try to pick up its style, its themes) (c) read a paragraph in depth; mark out what appears to be the logical flow of each sentence with a highlighter (d) mark the book up with thoughts, ideas (e) then cross reference each line with this book of annotations. It may just be me, but I find that c.40% of the Annotations are frivolous, and that I can come up with maybe 2-3 more per page - that's not because of the way in which Annotations is built, or because I've thought of something different. It's because of how wonderful Finnegans Wake is. This is the best book to use with FW - no bout adout it.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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7 reviews
30 of 30 people found the following review helpful
a succinct,useful, and functional assistant for "Wake-ing"
1 Oct 1997
Format: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....
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....
31 of 33 people found the following review helpful
Disappointing
4 Dec 2002
Format: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
A REFERENCE book
26 Mar 2004
Format: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.
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