This incisive study of James Joyce's work examines Finnegans Wake as a narrative response to acute problems of historical experience, especially issues of modern Irish identity implicit in historical writing about Ireland. Thomas C. Hofheinz shows how Joyce's narrative simulations of such problems enabled him to form startling linkages between public and private, objective and subjective Irish history. Hofheinz investigates Joyce's illumination of a wide range of issues - social, cultural, familial, psychological - by comparing Finnegans Wake with traditions of modern Irish historicism and historiography, including Ireland's place in the Catholic providential history of Vico's New Science; and he trenchantly challenges cultural-material methods of interpreting Joyce's historical 'subject', countering them with a reader-response philosophy owing much to the hermeneutics of Gadamer, Iser, and Ricoeur.