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Hardcover
Published: 2nd December 1992
ISBN: 9781857151008
Number Of Pages: 1076
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Published: 8th September 2009James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on one day in June 1904. It is considered to be one of the most important works of modernist literature and was hailed as a work of genius by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. Scandalously frank, wittily erudite, mercurially eloquent, resourcefully comic and generously humane, Ulysses offers the reader a life-changing experience
Scholars now say that Joyce calculated his novel mathematically so that the centremost word of the book is 'love'. He set it in Dublin on the day, 16 June 1904, that he first met Nora Barnacle, the woman who shared his life and bore him his alcoholic son and mad daughter. The language, so frequently comical, achieves a perfect accuracy that inclines the aspiring novelist to despair of ever, even glancingly, finding so bon a mot. So wide is the rendered experience that, like the Bible, Ulysses becomes appropriate to all considerations of life. Nothing much happens. People talk a lot. As Bernard Shaw said - there is no other book that so well conveys the life that Dublin offers to young men. Review by Frank Delaney, author of 'The Sins of the Mothers'. (Kirkus UK)
ISBN: 9781857151008
ISBN-10: 1857151003
Series: Everyman's Library classics
Audience:
General
Format:
Hardcover
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 1076
Published: 2nd December 1992
Publisher: Everyman
Country of Publication: GB
Dimensions (cm): 21.0 x 13.8
x 5.4
Weight (kg): 0.99
Edition Number: 1
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish novelist, noted for his experimental use of language in such works as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce's technical innovations in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue; he used a complex network of symbolic parallels drawn from the mythology, history, and literature, and created a unique language of invented words, puns, and allusions.
James Joyce was born in Dublin, on February 2, 1882, as the son of John Stanislaus Joyce, an impoverished gentleman, who had failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of professions, including politics and tax collecting. Joyce's mother, Mary Jane Murray, was ten years younger than her husband. She was an accomplished pianist, whose life was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. In spite of their poverty, the family struggled to maintain a solid middle-class facade.
From the age of six Joyce, was educated by Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College, at Clane, and then at Belvedere College in Dublin (1893-97). In 1898 he entered the University College, Dublin. Joyce's first publication was an essay on Ibsen's play When We Dead Awaken. It appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1900. At this time he also began writing lyric poems.
After graduation in 1902 the twenty-year-old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a journalist, teacher and in other occupations under difficult financial conditions. He spent a year in France, returning when a telegram arrived saying his mother was dying. Not long after her death, Joyce was traveling again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid who he married in 1931.
Joyce published Dubliners in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, a play Exilesin 1918 and Ulysses in 1922. In 1907 Joyce had published a collection of poems, Chamber Music.
At the outset of the First World War, Joyce moved with his family to Zürich. In Zürich Joyce started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, which was first published in France because of censorship troubles in the Great Britain and the United States, where the book became legally available only in 1933. In March 1923 Joyce started in Paris his second major work, Finnegans Wake, suffering at the same time chronic eye troubles caused by glaucoma. The first segment of the novel appeared in Ford Madox Ford's transatlantic review in April 1924, as part of what Joyce called Work in Progress. The final version was published in 1939.
Some critics considered the work a masterpiece, though many readers found it incomprehensible. After the fall of France in WWII, Joyce returned to Zürich, where he died on January 13, 1941, still disappointed with the reception of Finnegans Wake.
