“Allows us to rediscover why Finnegans Wake is still a vital book today: it is as bold in its exploration of universal culture as it is playful in its synthetic language, qualities that shine in the inspired pages. Linguistic excess and conceptual delimitation struggle less against one another than shape a beautiful chiasmus, the adequate equivalent of our expanding cosmos.”—Jean-Michel Rabaté, author of The Ghosts of Modernity

“This deeply learned book plunges us into the heart of Joyce’s most complex works to reveal a generative tension between boundary and excess, rule and rebellion, constraint and freedom. At once annotation and argument, this book belongs on the shelf of any serious Joyce scholar.”—Sean Latham, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ulysses