ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which Joyce's incorporation of Einstein's relativity theories into Finnegans Wake combines discourses in popular science, avant-garde periodicals, and even ephemeral documents such as a BBC radio pamphlet. The final two episodes of Ulysses emerged after Arthur Eddington made Albert Einstein a public figure in November 1919, yet Finnegans Wake developed entirely amid the powerful interwar science popularization industry that followed. Nicolson's pamphlet operates in the same market as J. M. W Sullivan's Aspects of Science, Bertrand Russell's ABC of Relativity, Arthur Eddington's The Expanding Universe, magazines such as The Enemy and transition, and a proliferation of other print materials such as fragmentary publications of the Wakeand a book of essays about it that Joyce orchestrated. Finnegans Wake is a primary example of the embodiment of the new physics and modernist humanism in the form of an experimental novel with ties both to the mainstream and the avant-garde presses.
