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Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is known for its experimental style and its reputation as one of the most difficult works in the Western canon. In 1928, installments began to appear in serialized form in literary journals under the title "fragments from Work in Progress". The actual title of the work remained a secret until the book was published in its entirety on 4 May 1939.

The initial reception of Finnegans Wake, both in its serialized form and in its final published form, was largely negative, ranging from bafflement at its radical reworking of the English language to open hostility towards its seeming pointlessness and lack of respect for literary conventions. Joyce, however, asserted that every syllable is justified.

Although the base language of the novel is English, it is an English that Joyce modified by combining and altering words from many language into an idiom unique to the Wake. Some believe this technique was Joyce's attempt to recreate the experience of the dreaming and half-wakened state, reproducing the way in which concepts, memories, people, and places get mixed together and transformed in sleep.

Despite the obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book's central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot. The book explores the lives of the Earwicker family, comprising the father HCE; the mother ALP; and, their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. Emphasizing its cyclical structure, the novel ends with an unfinished line that completes the fragment with which it began.