Ulysses

Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It was first serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918-December 1920 and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach in February 1922 in Paris. It is considered to be one of the most important works of modernist literature, referred to as "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement.” According to Declan Kiberd, “Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking.”

    Ulysses chronicles the peripatetic appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. Ulysses is the Latinized name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, and the novel establishes a series of parallels between the poem and the novel with structural correspondences between the characters and experiences of Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus, in addition to events and themes of the early Twentieth Century context of modernism, Dublin, and Ireland’s relationship to Britain. The novel imitates registers of centuries of English Literature and is highly allusive.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce. A Künstlerroman (a narrative about an artist’s growth to maturity) in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce and an allusion to Daedalus, the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began life in 1903 as Stephen Hero, a projected sixty-three-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style. After twenty-five chapters, Joyce abandoned Stephen Hero in 1907 and set to reworking its themes and protagonist into a condensed five-chapter novel, dispensing with strict realism and making extensive use of free indirect speech allowing the reader to peer into Stephen’s developing consciousness. American modernist poet Ezra Pound had the novel serialized in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914-1915, and published as a book in 1916 by B.W. Huebsch of New York. The publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the short story collection Dubliners (1914) earned Joyce a place at the forefront of literary modernism.

    In 1998 the Modern Library named the novel third on its list of the 100 Best English-Language Novels of the Twentieth Century.

Dubliners

Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. They form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle-class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the Twentieth Century. The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences. The stories center on Joyce’s idea of an epiphany: a moment where a character experiences a life-changing self-understanding or illumination. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appear in minor roles in Joyce’s novel Ulysses. The initial stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists, and as the stories continue, they deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. This is in line with Joyce’s tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence, and maturity.