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A Tour of the Darkling Plain The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen Edward M. Burns with Joshua Gaylord University College Dublin Press 2001
These letters of Adaline Glasheen and Thornton Wilder, written between 1950 and 1975, reveal the probing energy and encyclopedic knowledge they each brought to their study of James Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake. Adaline Glasheen is well known to Joyce scholars as the author of the Census, the indispensable companion to any study of the Wake. Thornton Wilder is described by Edmund Wilson, the author of seminal essays on the Wake, as having "explored the book more thoroughly than anyone else I have heard of." This fully annotated edition includes previously unpublished essays and notes by Wilder and Glasheen.
"In the late 1940s," writes Adaline Glasheen in the Introduction, "some friends and I took to playing around with Finnegans Wake, enjoying ourselves and doing our best to unriddle bits of that difficult and entertaining book. In 1950 I made an alphabetical list of such proper names as we had found at given lines and pages. I sent the list to several Joyceans, hoping they could add to it. One of these was Thornton Wilder who responded generously with additions and encouragement. For a quarter of a century, he went on to write these valuable letters. We met sometimes, we talked about Finnegans Wake for hours on the telephone. . . . The letters are an abiding record of a particular past—the amateur's age of unriddling. It was a time when Finnegans Wake was yet outside of literature, criticism, scholarship, when it had no price on the literary exchange, when it seemed capable of solution or dissolution at any moment."
"This meticulously edited volume is both delightful and entertaining." —Clive Hart, author of A Concordance to Finnegans Wake
"Quite apart from many minute insights into possible meanings of the Wake, this collection brings out the exuberance of those amateur pioneering raids into a mysterious, challenging, unfathomed book before there was yet a Joyce industry." —Fritz Senn, author of Joycean Murmoirs: Fritz Senn on James Joyce
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