ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

FAMOUS PLAYWRIGHT POET AND OTHERS

JAMES JOYCE

Question [CLICK ON ANY CHOICE TO KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER]
In Finnegans Wake, to which text(s) does Joyce make an allusion?
A
the Book of the Dead
B
the Bible
C
Vico’s La Scienza Nuova
D
All of the Above
Explanation: 

Detailed explanation-1: -The major works by Lewis Carrol that are mostly alluded to in Finnegans Wake are Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Detailed explanation-2: -Plot summary. Finnegans Wake is a complex novel that blends the reality of life with a dream world. The motive idea of the novel, inspired by the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, is that history is cyclical. To demonstrate this, the book ends with the first half of the first sentence of the novel.

Detailed explanation-3: -Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years and published in 1939, Finnegans Wake was Joyce’s final work. The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, which blends standard English words with neologistic portmanteau words, Irish mannerisms and puns in multiple languages to unique effect.

Detailed explanation-4: -Famously, the title of the book is a portmanteau word. At one level, it refers to an Irish pub song called “Finnegan’s Wake” (or “The Ballad of Tim Finnegan"), about the funeral of a man named Finnegan who fell off a ladder. It can also mean “in the wake of Finnegan, ” that is, everything post-Finnegan.

Detailed explanation-5: -’riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” These are the famous opening lines of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

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