The Restored Finnegans Wake

James Joyce
The Restored
FINNEGANS WAKE

Edited and with a Preface and Afterword by Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon, and Note by Seamus Deane

Published by Penguin Classics
Hardback, £30.00

“A salute to the editors, who have ended the wait and given us an opportunity – created against incredible odds – to break out of our critical slumber and see this masterpiece as it should be seen, clean and radiant again.” - Seamus Deane, Note to The Restored FINNEGANS WAKE

This new and definitive edition of Finnegans Wake is the sum of thirty years of intense textual engagement with the 20,000 pages of editorial material comprising James Joyce's composition of his fourth, and last, masterwork. Although the 9000 changes to the text are individually minor, they are nonetheless crucial in facilitating an accurate reading of the book's allusive density and essential fabric.

“This work – not least because of its fabled difficulty and the extensive period of its complex composition – requires critical editing more than any other modern novel. The available reading text is corrupt and has hardly changed from its original publication in 1939… The new reading text is restored in that it seeks to recreate and recover the text precisely as James Joyce wrote it – in notebooks, drafts, fair copies, typescripts and proofs… Overwhelmingly, the changes pertain to the syntax (the flow of the words) rather than to the semantics (their individual meanings). Syntactic changes are more important than they might at first seem. Finnegans Wake has often been described as music: as such, it is music of sense as much as it is music of sound, and, like all music, it must flow unhindered to be heard.”
- Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon,
from the Preface to The Restored FINNEGANS WAKE

“A great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page.” - Anthony Burgess

“Nothing so far as I make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization.” - Ezra Pound

“You have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence… I ask: who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousands I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?” - H.G. Wells

About the Editors Danis Rose is principal editor of the forthcoming critical edition and electronic hypertext of Finnegans Wake. His publications include The James Joyce Archive: Volumes 28-63 (with David Hayman and John O'Hanlon); The Index Manuscript; Understanding Finnegans Wake; The Lost Notebook; The Textual Diaries of James Joyce; and Ulysses: A New Reader's Edition. He was born in Dublin, where he now lives. John O'Hanlon has collaborated with Danis Rose in most of the Joyce-related projects, in particular in the preparation of the extensive electronic hypertext of Finnegans Wake.

Press contact: maria.garbuttlucero@uk.penguingroup.com / 020 7010 4989