A Concordance to Finnegans Wake
was first published in 1963. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This concordance, the first full-scale work dealing with the language of James Joyce's last period, provides a finding-list and analytical index for his last work,
Finnegans Wake
. There are three parts: the first consisting of a complete alphabetical index to the vocabulary of
,the second comprising a list of syllabifications (showing the inner parts of compound words), and the third providing a list of some 10,000 English words suggested by Joycean distortions.
The primary word-index, similar in most respects to those which have already been published for Joyce's
Ulysses
and
Stephen Hero
, list in alphabetical order all of the 63,924 different words which make up the vocabulary of
and provides page-line references for every occurrence of all but a small handful of the most common English words. Except for punctuation marks, every typographical unit in the book is accounted for, and each is listed just as it appears in the text.
The second on syllabification lists in alphabetical order the inner parts of over 10,000 complex words in
which are built up out of simpler elements and which would be impossible to find from the primary index alone.
In the last section, called "Overtones," the aim is to list the English words suggested by Joyce's puns and distortions. Much information gleaned from the Joycean research of the past decade is gathered together here.