The Steadfast Finnegans Wake

This breakthrough in literary criticism for the first time makes available a college-level textbook for James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The Victorian journalist William T. Stead provides an epic hero and a narrative sequence for the novel as well as thousands of facts about the text. The Stead source solves mysteries not fathomed with The Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: the identities of the Wake's narrator and of the sleeping giant "dreamer," the exact nature of Earwicker's "sin in the park," the author of the mysterious letter and its sense, the reason personalities such as Shem and Shaun appear with multiple names, and the identity of the "Maggies." The Stead source unifies the "bits and pieces" and fills in the "vast spaces of nonsense," of which prior critics have complained.