Synopses & Reviews
Review
"The key that will open [Finnegans Wake's] treasures." The New York Times
Review
Campbell and Robinson deserve a citation from the Republic of Letters for having succeeded in bringing out their Skeleton Key at this time....The chance to be among the first to explore the wonders of
Finnegans Wake is one of the few great intellectual and aesthetic treats that these last bad years have yielded.”
Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker
Joyce has found in Mr. Campbell and Mr. Robinson the ideal readers who approach his book with piety, passion, and intelligence, and who have devoted several years to fashioning the key that will open its treasures.”
Max Lerner, The New York Times
Synopsis
Though it had its early champions when published in 1939, Finnegans Wake, Joyces final novel, was (and is) more often met with puzzlement and even exasperation. Not so with Joseph Campbell, whod been immersing himself in the mythical and literary allusions Joyce used. In 1944, when Campbell was a young professor, he and poet and novelist Henry Morton Robinson, produced this, the first key” to Finnegans rich world. Campbell and Robinson outline the books action and clarify its images and references. And though many guides to Joyces epic have subsequently been written, theirs brims with a passion to override detractors and give Joyce his due. Authorized by the Joseph Campbell Foundation, this guide beautifully affirms Joyces resilient, all-enjoying, all-animating Yes.”
Synopsis
Countless would-be readers of Finnegans Wake — James Joyces 1939 masterwork, on which he labored for a third of his life — have given up after a few pages and dismissed the book as a perverse triumph of the unintelligible.” In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with novelist and poet Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first guide to understanding the fascinating world of Finnegans Wake. Page by page, chapter by chapter, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake outlines the basic action of Joyces book, simplifies and clarifies the complex web of images and allusions, and provides an understandable, continuous narrative from which the reader can venture out on his or her own. This edition includes a foreword and updates by Joyce scholar Dr. Edmund L. Epstein that add the context of sixty subsequent years of scholarship.
About the Author
Joseph Campbell is widely credited with bringing mythology to a mass audience. His works, including The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the four volume The Masks of God, and The Power of Myth (with Bill Moyers), rank among the classics in mythology and literature. Henry Morton Robinson was best known for his novel, The Cardinal.