Word: vicos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Vico's Cycle. In brisk, schoolmasterly fashion (both Burgess and Joyce once taught school), Burgess expounds, for those who came in late, the ABCs of Wake. The structure of the book, he explains, follows the four-cycle theory of history devised by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1774), in which human societies progress through the four stages of theocracy, aristocracy, democracy and ricorso (or recurrence). The title of the book is itself a Joycean wordplay. "Finn (fin or finis) -egan" could mean "end again," suggesting the completion of Vico's cycle, while "Wake" suggests rising from...