Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake is a work of comic fiction by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style. Owing to the work's expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and its abandonment of the conventions of plot and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains one of the most original works in world literature. The work has since come to assume a preeminent place in English literature. Anthony Burgess has praised the book as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page." Harold Bloom called the book "Joyce's masterpiece", and wrote that "[if] aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon [Finnegans Wake] would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante." In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Finnegans Wake 77th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.