The Sensual Philosophy offers a richly illuminating reading of James Joyce's canon, placing his texts in the context of the medieval mystical tradition that had influenced and interested Joyce since his school days. In exploring Joyce's indebtedness to the artistic and theological culture of the Middle Ages, Colleen Jaurretche also identifies the origins of modernist aesthetics in medieval forms of representation. Jaurretche follows the imprint of the "negative" mystical tradition-which seeks to surmount all human categories and sensations so as to encounter the divine-from its beginnings in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite through its culmination in the sixteenth-century writings of St. John of the Cross. Joyce sees these ideas, she notes, in the intellectual tradition of late Victorian and early Modern writers, such as William Blake, Walter Pater, Francis Thompson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats. She traces the development of Joyce's mystical aesthetic through a critical examination of his novels, culminating in the supreme negative mystical aestheticism of Finnegans Wake.

This innovative analysis shows how James Joyce uses the language of prayer to grapple with profoundly human ideas in Finnegans Wake-the dreamlike masterpiece that critics have called his "book of the night." Colleen Jaurretche moves beyond what scholars know about how Joyce composed this work to suggest why he wrote and arranged it as he did.Jaurretche provides a sequential reading of the four chapters and corresponding themes of the Wake from the perspective of prayer. She examines image, manifested by the letters of the alphabet and the Book of Kells; magic, which Joyce equates with the workings of language; dreams, which he relates to poetry; and speech, glorified in the Wake for its potential to express emotions and ecstasy. Jaurretche also delves into writings about prayer by important thinkers from antiquity to the present, including Origen of Alexandria, Giambattista Vico, and Giordano Bruno. She demonstrates how these philosophers influenced Joyce's view that prayer can imbue language with power.This book is an illuminating and much-needed interpretation of a work that abounds with echoes and cadences of sacred language. Jaurretche's insights will guide readers' understanding of the style and structure of Finnegans Wake. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles.