Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Atherton's book is "absotively" wonderful. Appreciating the Wake certainly requires this book. Numerous linguistic influences on Joyce from various authors are catalogued. Particularly interesting is the lengthy analysis of Lewis Carroll's literary influence on Joyce:
1. Carroll is presumably the undisputed inventor of the portmanteau word - a word packed with multiple meanings. Carroll was content to have dual meaning but Joyce packed as many meanings as possible into his words.
2. Carroll (like Joyce) worked with successive alterations of one letter in a word - meat, meet, mate, maze, etc. Sections of the Wake which obliquely referenced Carroll would routinely incorporate this technique.
3. Alice served as an alterego for Joyce's heroine ALP, where "Wonderlawn" is code for the Garden of Eden.
In short, Joyce found much in Carroll's work that (in the case of the portmanteau word, to his surprise) neatly "dovetallied" with his own "work in progress". The Books at the Wake is a fascinating and well-written collection of many more such analyses (Shakespeare, Blake, Vico, etc.).
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
In Finnegans Wake Joyce uses world literature, great and small, sacred and profane, as one of the most important and frequent of his sources. Setting out to explore these literary allusions, Mr. Atherton sheds a great deal of light upon other aspects of Joyce's work. Entire chapters are devoted to such major figures as Swift and Lewis Carroll, while less important influences are grouped together under such headings as "The Irish Writers" and "The Fathers of the Church." He also surveys the various interpretations of Finnegans Wake, and makes use of the Letters of James Joyce and the manuscript of Finnegans Wake in the British Museum.
