This guide to Finnegans Wake is the first to focus exclusively on the multiple meanings and voices in Joyce's notoriously intricate diction - the Wake's central experimental technique. Renowned Joyce scholars explore the polyvocality of individual chapters using game theory, ecocriticism, psychoanalysis, historicism, myth, philosophy, genetic studies, feminism, and other critical frameworks. They set in motion cross-currents and radiating structures of meaning that permeate the entire text and open up satisfying readings of the Wake for novices and seasoned readers alike.

A collection of 18 essays, each of which offers commentary on one of the episodes in ""Ulysses"". Throughout, the common critical concern is with varying articulations of ""femininities"" and ""masculinities"" in Joyce's modernist epic. Each contributor attends to the extensive and various markings of gender in ""Ulysses"" and examines the ways in which such markings generate and en-gender other meanings. Gender is treated as a form of overwriting, in senses that include both excess and layering. In this collection the differentiations of ""masculine"" and ""feminine"", their definitions and elaborations, are approached in multiple ways and in changing contexts. Familial roles, labour assignments, perceptual modes, colonialist categories, sexualities, ethnicities, ways of knowing and learning, scents, tastes and eating habits are but a few of the cultural phenomena the scholars explore. The essays are also responsive to influential trends such as historicism, psychoanalysis and culture critique.

This is the first Finnegans Wake guide to focus exclusively on the multiple meanings and voices in Joyce's notoriously intricate diction. Rather than leveling the text it illuminates many layers of puns, wordplay, and portmanteaus, celebrating the Wake's central experimental technique. Renowned Joyce scholars explore the polyvocality of individual chapters using game theory, ecocriticism, psychoanalysis, historicism, myth, philosophy, genetic studies, feminism, and other critical frameworks. They set in motion cross-currents and radiating structures of meaning that permeate the entire text and open up satisfying readings of the Wake for novices and seasoned readers alike.