“THE FIRST PUBLISHED CRITICAL WORK ON FINNEGANS WAKE”: SECOND ENGLISH EDITION OF OUR EXAGMINATION, 1936, FEATURING BECKETT’S DANTE…BRUNO. VICO.. JOYCE

(JOYCE, James, BECKETT, Samuel). Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress. By Samuel Beckett, Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage, William Carlos Williams. With Letters of Protest by G. V. L. Slingsby and Vladimir Dixon. London: Faber and Faber, [1936]. Quarto, original blue cloth.

Second English edition, printed from the same sheets as the initial Sylvia Beach edition, an exceptional collection of essays on Joyce’s still unpublished Finnegan’s Wake—“Joyce’s last and most innovative prose work”—featuring Samuel Beckett’s essay, “Dante… Bruno. Vico… Joyce.”

This scarce collection of essays on Finnegans Wake (1939)—“Joyce’s last and most innovative prose work”—was initially issued by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in May 1929. As “the first published critical work on Finnegans Wake … Our Exagmination provided an immediate answer to friends and critics who believed that Joyce was wasting his time and talent in writing Finnegans Wake” (Fargnoli & Gillespie, 74, 168). Beach recalled in her memoirs, “The title, of course, was Joyce’s; perhaps, too, the ‘Litter’at the end. The book was composed of 12 studies of Joyce’s new Work in Progress by 12 writers… who had been watching Work in Progress from the beginning, each seeing it from his own angle, but interested in Joyce’s experiment.” In addition to this volume’s “hostile and humorously illiterate” Letters of Protest are “quotations from Work in Progress as it had been appearing in transition… [and] a passage concerning Swift and blindness (109), which was not later incorporated in Finnegans Wake” (Slocum and Cahoon). Of these major essays by writers such as Stuart Gilbert and William Carlos Williams—“the best was by Samuel Beckett” (Ellman, 613). Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce was Beckett’s first work to be issued in book form. Second English edition, with sheets from the initial Sylvia Beach edition that were “sold by Shakespeare and Company to both Faber & Faber, London, and New Directions, Norfolk, Connecticut, who bound them with inserted title pages” (Slocum & Cahoon B10). With “Printed in France” on copyright page; as issued without dust jacket. See Federman & Fletcher 1-1.01. Bookplate of Alexander R. Sinclair, with his owner signature dated Feb. 1944.

Interior fresh and clean with only faint toning to edges, slight edge-wear, mild soiling to cloth. Near-fine condition.