Ulysses
Overview
Ulysses was originally serialized in The Little Review from 1918 to 1920. The story, divided into 18 episodes, follows Leopold Bloom as he travels through Dublin on June 16, 1904. The date is the actual day of Joyce’s first date with his wife. The story corresponds to Homer’s epic Odyssey. The title is the Latin form of Odysseus, the Odyssey’s protagonist.
Modern Library ranked Ulysses as the most important English-language novel of the twentieth century.
The digital edition of Joyce’s works is fully indexed and tagged, allowing for near-instant search results. Use the dictionary lookup tool to dig deeper in to Joyce’s novel use of English words. The books are linked with the rest of your library.
- Was named the most important English-language novel of the twentieth century
- Exemplifies the modernist stream-of-consciousness technique
- Inspired a work by philosopher Jacques Derrida
- Helped define the Modernist literature movement
James Joyce (1882–1941) was born in Dublin. He received his early education at two Jesuit schools, Clongowes and Belvedere. In 1898, he enrolled in University College in Dublin, where he studied English, French, and Latin, graduating in 1902. While at university, Joyce was involved in the theater and literary movements in the city. Following graduation, Joyce moved to Paris to study medicine. When the French lectures proved too difficult to follow, Joyce dropped out and returned to Dublin. Following his mother’s death in 1904, Joyce moved to Zurich and then to Trieste (at the time in Austra-Hungary), where he was a school teacher for 10 years. On the eve of WWI, Joyce moved back to Zurich, where he gained a patron whose support allowed him to focus on writing instead of teaching. In 1920, Joyce moved to Paris until 1940, when he returned to Zurich to escape the Nazis. He died in 1941 after surgery for a perforated colon.