Joyce, Race and 'Finnegans Wake'

Book excerpt: Len Platt charts a fresh approach through one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century literature. Using original archival research and detailed close readings, he outlines Joyce's literary response to the racial discourse of twentieth-century politics. Platt's account is the first to position Finnegans Wake in precise historical conditions and to explore Joyce's engagement with European fascism. Race, Platt claims, is a central theme for Joyce, both in terms of the colonial and post-colonial conflicts between the Irish and the British, and in terms of its use by the extreme right. It is in this context that Joyce's engagement with race, while certainly a product of colonial relations, also figures as a wider disputation with rationalism, capitalism and modernity.