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Ireland's National Library has acquired a 1.17-million-euro (1.39-million-dollar) previously-unknown six-page James Joyce manuscript, its director said Thursday.
The six sheets deal with the first stage of his last work, "Finnegans Wake", written between April and August 1923. They had been acquired through the French book trade by a British-based private collector and were sold by auctioneers Sotheby's.
The purchase of the manuscripts was funded by Allied Irish Bank under a special tax credit scheme. The bank donated them to the National Library which already has a major Joyce collection.
Because of Joyce's status in world literature -- he is second only to English playwright William Shakespeare in terms of the number of published studies of his work -- any new discovery related to his work is an important worldwide literary event.
Aongus O hAonghusa, the director of the National Library, told AFP that negotiations for the manuscript had been going on since late 2004.
He said the most fascinating aspects of the hand-written manuscript pages was the involvement of Joyce's wife Nora in his work and evidence of a collaborative effort.
"Her handwriting appears on three or four of the sheets," O hAonghusa said. "I think people knew she had helped him to some extent but these are three or four pages in her writing.
"Clearly he dictated the material to her. We know that in the middle part of 1923 his eyesight was particularly bad. He dictated the material and she scribbled it down.
"Then at some stage later when his eyesight improved he went back over it and made changes, particularly spelling changes. But he didn't correct all the spelling curiously enough, he retained some of her mis-spellings," O hAonghusa said.
The National Library says Joyce experts described the pencil-written sheets as containing "crucial elements" in the author's first efforts at writing a new work after his major book "Ulysses".
The collection contains texts of which there had been no previous evidence. They show Joyce decided to follow only some of the narrative threads, while abandoning the majority in the drafts.
Dublin-born Joyce based most of his literary output around the Irish capital despite the fact that he spent the bulk of his adult life in continental Europe, mainly in Paris, Trieste in Italy and Zurich.
It was the publication of Joyce's "Ulysses" in 1922 -- widely seen at the time as obscene -- that assured his major literary reputation.
The book describes a lengthy wander through Dublin by its hero, Leopold Bloom, on June 16, 1904.
Joyce draws a huge number of visitors to Dublin each year and the National Library has spent large sums in recent years purchasing his manuscripts.
The writer died in Zurich in 1941, aged 58.
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AFPLifestyle-Ireland-literature-Joyce
AFP 021918 GMT 03 06
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