The Wake is a work that involves a “designed” language, which Joyce declares is not English, because as his text points out, “in the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse of the world” (83.12).[375] The uniqueness of Joyce’s last two productions—Ulysses and the Wake—is their utilisation of the eighteenth century vision of Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova, by embracing aspects of: the history of the most ancient times; the history of the liberal arts and drama from Greece to Augustan England; and those of the recent history
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