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Dubliners – a study guide

June 16, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, summaries, study resources, further reading

Dubliners (1914) is James Joyce’s first major work – a ground-breaking collection of short stories dealing with the moribund lives of a cast of mostly lower-middle-class characters through pointedly undramatic events chosen to illustrate the crippling effects of family, religion, and nationality. He spent seven years working on them, even though he suspected publishing them might be difficult at the time – and he was right. He submitted the stories to seventeen publishers over the space of many years before they were finally accepted.

Dubliners First EditionThis collection of vignettes features both real and imaginary figures in Dublin life around the turn of the century, ending with the most famous of all Joyce’s stories – ‘The Dead’. The book caused controversy when it first appeared, and was banned in Ireland almost immediately upon publication, the first of many of Joyce’s works to be censored or banned in his native country. Dubliners is now widely regarded as a seminal collection of modern short stories.

Contemporary readers may wonder what all the fuss was about; but one hundred years ago at the start of the twentieth century any references to body functions, sexuality, and anti-religious sentiment was more or less unthinkable in Ireland – which is the principal reason why Joyce left his homeland in 1906, never to return.

Dubliners is a carefully arranged set of miniatures in which he strips away all the decorations and flourishes of late Victorian prose. What remains is a sparse yet lyrical exposure of small moments of revelation – which he called ‘epiphanies’. Like other modernists, such as Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, Joyce minimised the dramatic element of the short story in favour of symbolic meaning and a more static aesthetic. Instead of the surprise endings and dramatic twists of the typical nineteenth-century short story, Joyce offers subtle, understated character studies, revelations of mood and atmosphere, and small moments in life which reveal something about larger issues.

James Joyce – portrait


Dubliners – structure

Joyce gave his publisher Grant Richards the following account of his ideas for the structure of his collection:

“My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country, and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard.”

Section I, Childhood contains – The Sisters, An Encounter, and Araby (the most anthologised of the stories).

Section II, Adolescence is made up of – Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants, and The Boarding House.

Section III, Maturity is also made up of four stories – A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay, and A Painful Case.

Section IV, Public Life is made up of – Ivy Day in the Committee Room, A Mother, Grace, and the structurally different The Dead.


Sackville Street Dublin


Study resources

Dubliners Dubliners – Penguin Modern Classics – Amazon UK

Dubliners Dubliners – Penguin Modern Classics – Amazon US

Dubliners Dubliners – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon UK

Dubliners Dubliners – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon US

Dubliners Dubliners – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Dubliners Dubliners – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

Dubliners The Dead – 1987 film version by John Huston on DVD – Amazon UK

Dubliners Dubliners – Naxos audio CD version – Amazon UK

Dubliners Dubliners – audioBook version at LibriVox

Dubliners Dubliners – York Notes (Advanced) – Amazon UK

Dubliners Dubliners – Cliffs Notes study guide – Amazon UK

Pointer James Joyce: A Critical Guide – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce – Amazon UK

Red button James Joyce: Texts and Contexts – Amazon UK


Dubliners – chapter summaries

The Sisters – After the priest Father Flynn dies, a young boy who was close to him and his family deal with it only superficially. The events force him to examine their relationship and cause him to see himself as an individual for the first time.

An Encounter – Two schoolboys playing truant from school encounter an elderly man, who turns out to be a pervert.

Araby – A boy falls in love with the sister of his friend, but fails in his quest to buy her a worthy gift from the Araby bazaar. He becomes aware of the pain and unfulfilled dreams of the adult world.

Eveline – A young woman abandons her plans to leave Ireland with a sailor, and faces instead the prospect of remaining with her abusive father in order to help raise her younger siblings.

After the Race – College student Jimmy Doyle tries to fit in with his wealthy friends, and fails.

Two Gallants – Two con men, Lenehan and Corley, find a maid who is willing to steal from her employer.

The Boarding House – Mrs. Mooney successfully manoeuvres her daughter Polly into an upwardly mobile marriage with her lodger Mr. Doran.

A Little Cloud – Little Chandler’s dinner with his old friend Ignatius Gallaher casts fresh light on his own failed literary dreams. The story reflects also on Chandler’s mood upon realizing his baby son has replaced him as the centre of his wife’s affections.

Counterparts – Farrington, a lumbering alcoholic Irish scrivener, takes out his frustration in pubs and on his son Tom.

Clay – The old maid Maria, a laundress, celebrates Halloween with her former foster child Joe Donnelly and his family.

A Painful Case – Mr. Duffy rebuffs Mrs. Sinico, then four years later realizes he has condemned her to loneliness and death.

Ivy Day in the Committee Room – Minor Irish politicians fail to live up to the memory of Charles Stewart Parnell.

A Mother – Mrs. Kearney tries to win a place of pride for her daughter, Kathleen, in the Irish cultural movement, by starring her in a series of concerts, but ultimately fails.

Grace – After Mr. Kernan injures himself falling down the stairs in a bar, his friends try to reform him through Catholicism.

The Dead – Gabriel Conroy attends a party his wife, has an epiphany about the nature of life and death.


Dubliners – video short


Epiphanies

When Joyce wrote Dubliners it was at a time when he was seeking to strip bare what he saw as the smugness and hypocrisy which Britain had inherited from its Victorian epoch. To do this he felt that a new sense of realism and honesty was necessary, and in literary terms this meant dealing with subjects which were not always particularly pleasant or uplifting, but might on the contrary be concerned with the sadder and negative aspects of life. Even these, he felt, should be depicted with scrupulous honesty and objectivity.

He postulated the notion (as did Virginia Woolf only a few years later) that revelations about the truths of life are available to us in special moments – fleeting episodes, snatches of conversation, or a sudden dawning of awareness which as he said, was like ‘the revelation of the whatness of a thing’. To describe these experiences he borrowed the term ‘epiphanies’ from his religious background. It means ‘a manifestation’ or ‘showing forth’ – but he gave it a secular meaning. The sometimes negative and transient nature of these moments are underscored by Richard Ellman, Joyce’s biographer:

The unpalatable epiphanies often include things to be got rid of, examples of fatuity or imperceptiveness, caught deftly in a conversational exchange of two or three sentences.

But Joyce also believed that the author of a work should not be present in his story – nudging the reader’s elbow, telling him what to think and feel – but should scrupulously remove himself from the work and let it speak for itself. [This was a notion he had inherited from Flaubert.] Consequently these epiphanies when they occur are often understated: Joyce does not specially draw our attention to what is going on but leaves us to work out or sense the implications for ourselves.

To make matters even more subtle, the revelations, when they occur, are not always fully evident to the fictional character undergoing the experience – but they are nonetheless available to the attentive reader.


Balscadden Bay, Howth

Howth, Dublin


The short story

Joyce was well aware of developments in the modern short story. He was an admirer of Flaubert, whose precision of style was influential in the late nineteenth century. He also knew the work of Maupassant and Checkhov, who had done a great deal to bring realistic, everyday subjects to prose fiction – often featuring raw, painful, and frank exposures of negative aspects of daily life. Joyce followed these tendencies by removing suspense or any overt drama from his stories. Instead, he focused his attention on what he called ‘epiphanies’.

The stories in Dubliners are arranged in rising order of length and complexity, and also in the age of the central character. They are best read in that sequence by first time readers. The early stories are brief character sketches, studies in mood, and revelations of desperation and failure. The sequence ends with the longest and very celebrated story, The Dead, which combines Irish culture and politics with a poignant study in personal weakness and disappointment.

Joyce writes in a spare, undecorated, almost Spartan style. As he said of this approach himself: ‘I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness.’ There are very few figures of speech, no exaggeration, and no rhetorical flourishes – until the very last story in the collection. Most of the time Joyce shows events from the point of view of the principal character in each story – and in fact his style and choice of vocabulary closely reflects their consciousness.

more on the short story


Trinity College Dublin

Trinity College Dublin (TCD)


Further reading

Pointer Anthony Burgess, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce, Andre Deutsch, 1973.

Pointer Robert H. Deming (ed), James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 2 Vols, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1970.

Pointer Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, 1959.

Pointer Richard Ellmann and Stuart Gilbert (eds), The Letters of James Joyce, 3 Vols, Faber, 1957-66.

Pointer Seon Givens, James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, New York: Vanguard Press, 1963.

Pointer Suzette A. Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1990.

Pointer Harry Levin, James Joyce: a Critical Introduction, New York: New Directions, 1960.

Pointer Colin MacCabe (ed), James Joyce: New Perspectives, Harvester, 1982.

Pointer W.J. McCormack and Alistair Stead (eds), James Joyce and Modern Literature, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1982.

Pointer Dominic Maganiello, Joyce’s Politics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

Pointer Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce, Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Pointer C.H. Peake, James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist, Arnold, 1977.

Pointer Jean-Michel Rabaté, Joyce Upon the Void, Macmillan, 1991.

Pointer Lee Spinks, James Joyce: A Critical Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009

Pointer W.Y. Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce, Thames and Hudson, 1959.


Dublin 1915

Dublin 1915


Major works by James Joyce

James Joyce greatest works A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce’s first complete novel – a largely autobiographical account of a young man’s struggle with Catholicism and his desire to forge himself as an artist. It features a prose style whose complexity develops in parallel with the growth of the hero, Stephen Dedalus. The early pages are written from a child’s point of view, but then they quickly become more sophisticated. As Stephen struggles with religious belief and the growth of his sexual feelings as a young adult, the prose become more complex and philosophical. In addition to the account of his personal life and a critique of Irish society at the beginning of the last century, it also incorporates the creation of an aesthetic philosophy which was unmistakably that of Joyce himself. The novel ends with Stephen quitting Ireland for good, just as Joyce himself was to do – never to return.
James Joyce greatest works A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Buy the book at Amazon UK
James Joyce greatest works A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Buy the book at Amazon US

James Joyce greatest works UlyssesUlysses (1922) is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and it is certainly Joyce’s most celebrated work. He takes Homer’s Odyssey as a structural framework and uses it as the base to create a complex story of characters moving around Dublin on a single day in June 1904. Each separate chapter is written in a different prose style to reflect its theme or subject. The novel also includes two forms of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. This was Joyce’s attempt to reproduce the apparently random way in which our perceptions of the world are mixed with our conscious ideas and memories in an unstoppable flow of thought. There is a famous last chapter which is an eighty page unpunctuated soliloquy of a woman as she lies in bed at night, mulling over the events of her life and episodes from the previous day.
James Joyce greatest works Ulysses Buy the book at Amazon UK
James Joyce greatest works Ulysses Buy the book at Amazon US


The Cambridge Companion to James JoyceThe Cambridge Companion to James Joyce contains eleven essays by an international team of leading Joyce scholars. The topics covered include his debt to Irish and European writers and traditions, his life in Paris, and the relation of his work to the ‘modern’ spirit of sceptical relativism. One essay describes Joyce’s developing achievement in his earlier works (Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Another tackles his best-known text, asking the basic question ‘What is Ulysses about, and how can it be read?’ The issue of ‘difficulty’ raised by Finnegans Wake is directly addressed, and the reader is taken through questions of theme, language, structure and meaning, as well as the book’s composition and the history of Wake criticism.
The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce Buy the book at Amazon US


James Joyce – web links

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Project Gutenberg
A limited collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of the major works, religion, music, list of biographies, and external web links.

James Joyce on film James Joyce at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plus box office, technical credits, and quizzes.

James Joyce exhibition James Joyce Centre in Dublin
Exhibition centre, walking tours, lectures, and newsletter. The latest addition is a graphic novel version of ‘Ulysses’.

James Joyce web links The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection
University of Wisconsin – digitised scans of Finnegans Wake and out-of-print studies on Joyce’s language, plus rare critical studies.

James Joyce web links An Annotated Ulysses
An online version of Ulysses with hyperlinks giving explanations of obscure and classical references in the text.

James Joyce web links Cornell’s James Joyce Collection
Cornell University – a collection of letters, manuscripts, and books documenting the life and work of James Joyce on exhibition in 2005. Particularly strong on Joyce’s early life.

James Joyce web links A Bibliography of Scholarship and Criticism
Slightly dated but still useful web-based compilation of criticism and commentary – covers Joyce himself, plus the stories and novels.

© Roy Johnson 2010


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Filed Under: James Joyce Tagged With: Dubliners, James Joyce, Literary studies, Modernism, study guide, The Short Story

Giacomo Joyce

October 28, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Giacomo Joyce is a short work written by James Joyce in 1914, immediately after the publication of Dubliners, his collection of short stories. Joyce produced the text when he was living in Trieste some time around 1914. The manuscript comprises sixteen sheets of paper covered in what look like notes. It was rescued by his brother Stanislaus and remained unpublished during Joyce’s own lifetime, passing into the hands of a private collector who has always remained anonymous.

Giacomo Joyce

It was first published in a one-time limited edition by the Viking Press in New York in 1968. The text was presented in a slipcase housing a collection of sixteen pages in facsimile. The work was eventually published in commercial paperback format by Faber and Faber in London in 1983.

Giacomo Joyce – the text

The current publication is a short book in four parts. The first part is an introductory essay by Richard Ellmann, Joyce’s definitive biographer. His essay places the text in its historical context and explains its provenance.

The second part of the book is the text of the story itself – a page-for-page transcription of the manuscript set in type, with its original widely spaced paragraphs.

Part three is a selection of the original pages reproduced in a facsimile of Joyce’s original spidery handwriting. The fourth part is a set of explanatory notes to references in the text.


Giacomo Joyce – critical commentary

Genre

This is a remarkably short piece of work, and yet it is rather difficult to categorise in terms of literary genre. It has some of the concentration of a novella in terms of location, theme, and action, but it is really too short to be considered as such. It’s about the same length as a typical short story, yet it is written in such a highly poetical style, it would seem disqualified from that category too.

In his introductory essay Richard Ellmann calls it ‘A love poem which is never recited’ but then later as ‘this most delicate of novels’. Certainly it is not a poem in the conventional sense, and calling it a ‘novel’ is stretching that term way beyond its natural breaking point.

Perhaps the nearest available category is the ‘prose poem’ It is a short piece of work which deals with a brief episode in the sentimental education of a young man. It is written in a highly wrought and very poetical style, and its main narrative interest is on the evocation of an erotic obsession and its resolution in an epiphany. The theme of this epiphany is the need for realism.

Style

The story is largely cast as an interior monologue, with occasional use of a first person narrative mode. Giacomo’s thoughts and observations are offered in a flow of images and fragments of sentences which often have no subject or finite verb.

Twilight. Crossing the piazza. Grey eve lowering on sagegreen pasturelands, shedding silently dusk and dew. She follows her mother with ungainly grace, the mare leading her filly foal. Grey twilight moulds softly the slim and shapely haunches, the meek supple tendenous neck, the fine-boned skull. Eve, peace, the dusk of wonder ….

There is a great deal of assonance, alliteration, and conscious poetic repetition. Very little distinction is made between thought and speech, and much of the speech itself is unattributed – until the end of the work, when Joyce introduces what was to become his trade-mark use of the dash to mark separate utterances.

The work also reflects Joyce’s incorporation of foreign languages into his work – which was to reach its most extended use in Finnegans Wake. The English text here incorporates Italian, German, Latin, and even a Triestine dialect.

Biography

There is very little doubt that the incident is autobiographical in origin. During the narrative Joyce refers to Giacomo as ‘Jamesy’ and ‘Jim’ and at one point refers to his wife as ‘Nora’. Giacomo is the Italian form of the author’s own name James, but it is also a familiar epithet applied in Italy to denote a ‘great lover’.

At the time of its composition Joyce was working in Trieste, Italy (which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire). He was giving lectures on literature and teaching English the Berlitz school of languages – just as his protagonist Giacomo is doing.

Ellmann identifies a number of incidents that act as sources for the events of the piece – all of them taking place between 1911 and 1913. Joyce was working on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the same time – and Giacomo even shows Amalia some of the early drafts of his own work with the same name.

The main theme of the work is that of an older man in unrequited love with a younger woman – something Joyce had discussed with his friend and former pupil Italo Svevo (real name, Ettore Schmitz) who had written a novel on the same theme over a decade previously – As a Man Grows Older (1898).

Ellmann also traces elements of Giacomo Joyce which were later to be reworked directly into passages in Portrait and Ulysses.


Giacomo Joyce – story synopsis

A young Irish tutor of English in Trieste is attracted to one of his students. She is a beautiful young Jewess: he is married with a family. Her father passes on her compliments and praise for his skills as a teacher.

He looks up at her house at night and visits her family grave in the Jewish cemetery, fantasising about undressing her.

On a cold morning he joins her in church for mass, then he lectures on Hamlet. She is suddenly taken away for the removal of her appendix.

He gives her the manuscript of his novel to read (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and watches her from a distance at the opera.

He then fantasises on the fact that her hands have touched his manuscript and she has shared his written thoughts.

His friend Gogarty arrives to discuss Ulysses and he is reclaimed from his fantasies about the girl by a kiss from his wife Nora.

He feels that he must pass from a youthful to a more adult state of being – and that he must write about the experience.


Giacomo Joyce – study resources

Giacomo Joyce Giacomo Joyce – Amazon UK
Giacomo Joyce Giacomo Joyce – Amazon US

Giacomo Joyce Envoys of the Other (essays) – Amazon UK
Giacomo Joyce Envoys of the Other (essays) – Amazon US

Giacomo Joyce James Joyce (biography) – Amazon UK
Giacomo Joyce James Joyce (biography) – Amazon US


James Joyce, Giacomo Joyce, London: Faber and Faber, 1983, pp.64, ISBN: 0571131646


James Joyce - portrait


James Joyce – web links

This short selection of James Joyce web links offers quick connections to resources for further study. It’s not comprehensive, and if you have any ideas for additional resources, please use the ‘Comments’ box below to make suggestions.

James Joyce at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

James Joyce at Project Gutenberg
A limited collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

James Joyce at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of the major works, religion, music, list of biographies, and external web links.

James Joyce at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plus box office, technical credits, and quizzes.

James Joyce Centre in Dublin
Exhibition centre, walking tours, lectures, and newsletter. The latest addition is a graphic novel version of ‘Ulysses’.

The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection
University of Wisconsin – digitised scans of Finnegans Wake and out-of-print studies on Joyce’s language, plus rare critical studies.

An Annotated Ulysses
An online version of Ulysses with hyperlinks giving explanations of obscure and classical references in the text.

Cornell’s James Joyce Collection
Cornell University – a collection of letters, manuscripts, and books documenting the life and work of James Joyce on exhibition in 2005. Particularly strong on Joyce’s early life.


James Joyce and Samuel Beckett

Very funny short film featuring James Joyce playing pitch and put with Samuel Beckett.


The Cambridge Companion to James JoyceThe Cambridge Companion to James Joyce contains eleven essays by an international team of leading Joyce scholars. The topics covered include his debt to Irish and European writers and traditions, his life in Paris, and the relation of his work to the ‘modern’ spirit of sceptical relativism. One essay describes Joyce’s developing achievement in his earlier works (Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Another tackles his best-known text, asking the basic question ‘What is Ulysses about, and how can it be read?’ The issue of ‘difficulty’ raised by Finnegans Wake is directly addressed, and the reader is taken through questions of theme, language, structure and meaning, as well as the book’s composition and the history of Wake criticism.
The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce Buy the book here

© Roy Johnson 2015


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Filed Under: James Joyce Tagged With: English literature, James Joyce, Literary studies, Modernism

James Joyce – life and works

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

James Joyce - portrait1882. James Joyce was born in Dublin, the eldest of ten children. His father was a rather improvident tax collector. The family became progressively impoverished.

1888. He was educated in Jesuit schools, with emphasis on Catholic and scholastic doctrine. [These establishments were also renowned for their intellectual rigour.] Joyce was a talented student, especially good at languages. He moved from being devout to bitterly anti-Catholic. These experiences were later used as material for his autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

1893. Enters Belvedere College, a Jesuit boys’ day school – fees having been waived because of family’s needy circumstances.

1894. Joyce reads Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses and writes theme on Ulysses as ‘my favourite hero’.

1897. Wins prize for best English composition in Ireland for his age group.

1898. Studies languages at University College, Dublin. Rebels against Church, Family, and the State. Begins to read Ibsen. Active campaigner for freedom of expression and equality for women.

1902 Leaves university to study medicine in Paris, but gives it up and writes reviews for newspapers.

1904. Back in Dublin following his mother’s death, Joyce meets Nora Barnacle on June 10, subsequently to be known as ‘Bloomsday’ and used as temporal setting for Ulysses. Opposed to marriage, but unable to live together because of moral climate at that time, they move to Trieste and live there for the next ten years. Joyce earns a precarious living teaching English at the Berlitz School of Languages.

1905. Joyce writing stories which are later collected as Dubliners, and Stephen Hero, a novel based on his own early life. Supported by his brother Stanislaus.


James Joyce - biography James Joyce is an acclaimed biography, considered by many to be the definitive account of Joyce’s life and work. Richard Ellmann has a sympathetic grasp of Joyce’s personality. A reverence for his literary accomplishment is balanced by a bemused affection for his weaknesses. Whether Joyce is putting the finishing touches to Ulysses, falling down drunk in the streets of Trieste, or writing erotic messages to his future wife, Ellmann’s account always shows us a genius and a human being. This latest edition has been revised and expanded to include newly discovered primary material, including details of a failed love affair, a limerick about Samuel Beckett, a dream notebook, and previously unknown letters.


1907. Publishes Chamber Music (poems). Financial hardship partly self-induced as a result of erratic and improvident lifestyle. Eyesight problems begin.

1908. Begins revising Stephen Hero. Many unsuccessful attempts to have Dubliners published.

1909. Returns to Dublin and opens the city’s first cinema – the ‘Volta’.

1912. Lectures on Defoe and Blake at Trieste University. Passes Italian state exams to become a teacher. Lectures on Hamlet.

1913. Writes Giacomo Joyce, a novella based on unconsummated affair with one of his language students. Corresponds with American poet Ezra Pound, who begins serialization of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in his magazine the Egoist.

1914. Joyce’s annus mirablis. Publication of Dubliners. Begins writing Ulysses.

1915. Completes Exiles, a play. Family moves to neutral Switzerland during first world war. Zurich important centre for arts, theatre, and political exiles. Awarded a grant (£75) from Royal Literary Fund.

1917. American and English editions of Portrait well received. Further eye operations. Harriet Shaw Weaver begins her financial support which lasts throughout the rest of Joyce’s life: (she even pays for his funeral).

1918. Serialization of Ulysses begins in the American magazine Little Review. Reputation grows. Forms a theatrical group, the English Players, and stages The Importance of Being Earnest.

1919. Copies of Little Review confiscated and burned by US Postal Authorities. Family returns to Trieste.

1920. Family moves to live in Paris for next twenty years. Friendships with Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T.S.Eliot. Supported by American bookshop owner Sylvia Beech.

1921. Little Review prosecuted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice for publishing extracts from Ulysses. Sylvia Beech offers to publish under the imprint of her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company.

1922. Ulysses printed in Dijon and published on Joyce’s fortieth birthday. Nora refuses to read it.

1923. Writes the first pages of Finnegans Wake. More eye operations fail to save failing sight. Ulysses pirated in America and copies seized by customs in England.

1927. Fragments of the Wake published in small magazines, but work is constantly revised and re-written.

1930. Publication of Stuart Gilbert’s critical study James Joyce’s Ulysses, written with Joyce’s assistance.

1931. Travels to London with Nora to be married ‘for testamentary reasons’ following the death of his father. Daughter Lucia goes mad after falling in love with Samuel Beckett, who was then acting as Joyce’s secretary.

1934. First publication in USA of Ulysses by Random House. Travels to Switzerland to be near Lucia who was in a mental institution. Almost blind, Joyces writes in coloured crayons.

1935. Continues work on Finnegans Wake. (Nora describes it as – “that chop suey he’s writing”).

1936. First publication in UK of Ulysses by Bodley Head.

1939. Finnegans Wake published in London and New York in the year of Joyce’s fifty-seventh birthday.

1941. Following the occupation of France, Joyces move back to neutral Switzerland. Joyce dies after an abdominal operation. (Joyce’s dates 1882-1941 identical to those of Virginia Woolf.)

© Roy Johnson 2004


The Cambridge Companion to James JoyceThe Cambridge Companion to James Joyce contains eleven essays by an international team of leading Joyce scholars. The topics covered include his debt to Irish and European writers and traditions, his life in Paris, and the relation of his work to the ‘modern’ spirit of sceptical relativism. One essay describes Joyce’s developing achievement in his earlier works (Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), while another tackles his best-known text, asking the basic question ‘What is Ulysses about, and how can it be read?’ The issue of ‘difficulty’ raised by Finnegans Wake is directly addressed, and the reader is taken through questions of theme, language, structure and meaning, as well as the book’s composition and the history of Wake criticism.


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Filed Under: James Joyce Tagged With: Biography, James Joyce, Literary studies, Modernism

James Joyce A Critical Guide

August 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

biography, explication, criticism

It is interesting to note that almost all of the great writers of the modernist movement published their seminal texts within a few years of each other: D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love in 1920, James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in 1925, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial in the same year. James Joyce A Critical Guide, an introduction to the writer and his work, is split into three sections. The first deals with Joyce’s life and the context in which his works were produced.

James Joyce A Critical GuideThe second is an examination of his major publications, treated in the order that they were written. And the third is an account of the critical responses that his work has evoked over the years. Now that James Joyce is established as part of the canon of modernist literature, it’s easy to forget the public difficulties and personal sacrifices he made in order that his version of art be given a fair hearing. As Lee Spinks observes:

His systematic transformation of the nature and scope of the novel and his protracted struggle against the legal censorship and suppression of his work extended the possibilities of modern art and helped to redraw the boundaries between the claims of public morality and the rights of artistic expression for his own and succeeding generations.

Part One is a very enjoyable account of Joyce’s life and his artistic development, with occasional excursions into Irish politics and history. Joyce’s personal existence was restless, peripatetic, and pan-European, yet in his work he wrote about the same thing all his life – Ireland, the country to which he never returned.

In Part Two Spinks offers a critical account of each of Joyce’s major works. This includes their genesis, their themes, and in particular the development of his literary style. This represents an almost continuous line of increasing complexity from 1905 to 1939 with the publication of Finnegans Wake. This is the largest section of the book, and each of its parts is supplemented by suggestions for further reading.

I was glad to note that there was a full account of the very tangled and much-debated status of the text of Ulysses. This was supposed to be settled conclusively with the publication of Hans Walter Gabler’s ‘corrected edition’ of 1986, but despite his supposed rigorous editorial method, it seems to have made matters even worse. Spinks opts to recommend Jeri Johnson’s critical edition of Ulysses (1988) published by Oxford University Press.

Part Three deals with the critical reception of Joyce’s work. Spinks points to the fact that right from the beginning as Joyce’s work began to appear in various little magazines, it tended to divide opinion quite markedly. Many critics at first objected to his frankness and consideration of topics (sex, religion) which we now regard as quite harmless. Others admired the freshness and originality of his style. It was the publication of Ulysses which really galvanized both these tendencies, and we are reminded that the novel was –

a work that was reviled, celebrated, legally examined, banned, pirated and reinterpreted as a modernist ‘classic’ within twenty years of its publication

He splits his observations into two parts – criticism before and after Joyce’s death. The first of these periods sees relatively traditional commentators grappling with the highpoint of literary experimentation and modernism. The second includes all the recently fashionable schools of structuralism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. You’ll need a strong intellectual stomach to cope with some of these critics, many of whom seem more interested in making life difficult rather than throwing instructive light onto somebody else’s work.

Finnegans Wake remains a challenge to them all, for like the other major figures of early literary modernism, Joyce was drawn to push the nature of the novel to almost unreadable limits – just as Woolf did with The Waves, Thomas Mann with Joseph and his Brothers, and Herman Broch did with The Death of Virgil.

But despite the difficulties of his later work, Joyce is an approachable and very amusing writer – which is rare amongst the modernists. Anyone seeking assistance with the deeper aspects of his work would do well to consult a guide such as this. It offers clear and readable pathways through the thickets of both the work and commentary upon it.

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© Roy Johnson 2009


Lee Spinks, James Joyce: A Critical Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pp.233, ISBN: 0748638369


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James Joyce criticism

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a bibliography of criticism and commentary

James Joyce criticism - small portraitHarry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book, London: Routledge, 1996.

Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Oxford University Press, 1972.

Anthony Burgess, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce, Andre Deutsch, 1973.

Robert H. Deming (ed), James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 2 Vols, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1970.

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, 1959.

Richard Ellman and Stuart Gilbert (eds), The Letters of James Joyce, 3 Vols, Faber, 1957-66.

Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses: a Study, Faber and Faber, 1930.

Seon Givens, James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, N.Y.: Vanguard Press, 1963.

S.C. Goldberg, The Classical Temper, Oxford University Press, 1961.

Suzette A. Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1990.

Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices, Faber, 1978.

Harry Levin, James Joyce: a Critical Introduction, New York: New Directions, 1960.

Colin MacCabe (ed), James Joyce: New Perspectives, Harvester, 1982.

W.J. McCormack and Alistair Stead (eds), James Joyce and Modern Literature, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1982.

Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce, Cambridge University Press, 1984.

C.H. Peake, James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist, Arnold, 1977.

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Joyce Upon the Void, Macmillan, 1991.

Lee Spinks, James Joyce, Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

W.Y. Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce, Thames and Hudson, 1959.


The Cambridge Companion to James JoyceThe Cambridge Companion to James Joyce contains eleven essays by an international team of leading Joyce scholars. The topics covered include his debt to Irish and European writers and traditions, his life in Paris, and the relation of his work to the ‘modern’ spirit of sceptical relativism. One essay describes Joyce’s developing achievement in his earlier works (Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Another tackles his best-known text, asking the basic question ‘What is Ulysses about, and how can it be read?’ The issue of ‘difficulty’ raised by Finnegans Wake is directly addressed, and the reader is taken through questions of theme, language, structure and meaning, as well as the book’s composition and the history of Wake criticism.
The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce Buy the book here


James Joyce – web links

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Project Gutenberg
A limited collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of the major works, religion, music, list of biographies, and external web links.

James Joyce on film James Joyce at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plus box office, technical credits, and quizzes.

James Joyce exhibition James Joyce Centre in Dublin
Exhibition centre, walking tours, lectures, and newsletter. The latest addition is a graphic novel version of ‘Ulysses’.

James Joyce web links The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection
University of Wisconsin – digitised scans of Finnegans Wake and out-of-print studies on Joyce’s language, plus rare critical studies.

James Joyce web links An Annotated Ulysses
An online version of Ulysses with hyperlinks giving explanations of obscure and classical references in the text.

James Joyce web links Cornell’s James Joyce Collection
Cornell University – a collection of letters, manuscripts, and books documenting the life and work of James Joyce on exhibition in 2005. Particularly strong on Joyce’s early life.

© Roy Johnson 2004


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James Joyce greatest works

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

an introduction to the major stories and novels

If you read Joyce’s work in the same order that he wrote it, the sequence forms a perfect James Joyce tutorial. His early writing is simple and easy to understand, then it gradually becomes more complex as he experimented with the possibilities of language. Be prepared to extend the range of your vocabulary, to discover prose blended with poetry, and to encounter amazingly inventive word-play in the later work. Joyce’s writing was also considered quite scandalous when it first appeared, because it is critical of religion and frank about sexual matters.

DublinersDubliners is his first major work – a ground-breaking collection of short stories in which he strips away all the decorations and flourishes of late Victorian prose style. What remains is a sparse yet lyrical exposure of small moments of revelation – which he called ‘epiphanies’. Like other modernists, such as Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, Joyce minimised the dramatic element of the short story in favour of symbolic meaning and a more static aesthetic. This collection of vignettes features both real and imaginary figures in Dublin life around the turn of the century. The collection ends with the most famous of all Joyce’s stories – ‘The Dead’. It caused controversy when it first appeared, and was the first of many of Joyce’s works to be banned in his native country. Dubliners is now widely regarded as a seminal collection of modern short stories. New readers should start here.
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James Joyce greatest works A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce’s first complete novel – a largely autobiographical account of a young man’s struggle with Catholicism and his desire to forge himself as an artist. It features a prose style whose complexity develops in parallel with the growth of the hero, Stephen Dedalus. The early pages are written from a child’s point of view, but then they quickly become more sophisticated. As Stephen struggles with religious belief and the growth of his sexual feelings as a young adult, the prose become more complex and philosophical. In addition to the account of his personal life and a critique of Irish society at the beginning of the last century, it also incorporates the creation of an aesthetic philosophy which was unmistakably that of Joyce himself. The novel ends with Stephen quitting Ireland for good, just as Joyce himself was to do – never to return.
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James Joyce greatest works UlyssesUlysses (1922) is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and it is certainly Joyce’s most celebrated work. He takes Homer’s Odyssey as a structural framework and uses it as the base to create a complex story of characters moving around Dublin on a single day in June 1904. Each separate chapter is written in a different prose style to reflect its theme or subject. The novel also includes two forms of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. This was Joyce’s attempt to reproduce the apparently random way in which our perceptions of the world are mixed with our conscious ideas and memories in an unstoppable flow of thought. There is a famous last chapter which is an eighty page unpunctuated soliloquy of a woman as she lies in bed at night, mulling over the events of her life and episodes from the previous day.
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James Joyce greatest works Finnegans WakeFinnegans Wake is famous in literary circles as a great novel which almost no one has ever read. Joyce said that he spent seventeen years of his life writing Finnegans Wake and that he expected readers to spend the rest of their lives trying to understand it. It continues where Ulysses leaves off in terms of linguistic complexity. Written and rewritten many times over, Joyce eventually decided to incorporate many languages other than English into the narrative. It is a fantastic crossword-puzzle of puns, parodies, jokes and linguistic invention which make enormous intellectual demands on the reader. This, in addition to the many arcane references and a very complex narrative make Finnegans Wake a literary experiment which has never been surpassed. It is one of the great unread masterpieces of twentieth century literature.
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The Cambridge Companion to James JoyceThe Cambridge Companion to James Joyce contains eleven essays by an international team of leading Joyce scholars. The topics covered include his debt to Irish and European writers and traditions, his life in Paris, and the relation of his work to the ‘modern’ spirit of sceptical relativism. One essay describes Joyce’s developing achievement in his earlier works (Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Another tackles his best-known text, asking the basic question ‘What is Ulysses about, and how can it be read?’ The issue of ‘difficulty’ raised by Finnegans Wake is directly addressed, and the reader is taken through questions of theme, language, structure and meaning, as well as the book’s composition and the history of Wake criticism.
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James Joyce – web links

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Project Gutenberg
A limited collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of the major works, religion, music, list of biographies, and external web links.

James Joyce on film James Joyce at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plus box office, technical credits, and quizzes.

James Joyce exhibition James Joyce Centre in Dublin
Exhibition centre, walking tours, lectures, and newsletter. The latest addition is a graphic novel version of ‘Ulysses’.

James Joyce web links The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection
University of Wisconsin – digitised scans of Finnegans Wake and out-of-print studies on Joyce’s language, plus rare critical studies.

James Joyce web links An Annotated Ulysses
An online version of Ulysses with hyperlinks giving explanations of obscure and classical references in the text.

James Joyce web links Cornell’s James Joyce Collection
Cornell University – a collection of letters, manuscripts, and books documenting the life and work of James Joyce on exhibition in 2005. Particularly strong on Joyce’s early life.

© Roy Johnson 2004


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James Joyce web links

December 9, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a selection of web-based archives and resources

This short selection of James Joyce web links offers quick connections to resources for further study. It’s not comprehensive, and if you have any ideas for additional resources, please use the ‘Comments’ box below to make suggestions.

James Joyce - portrait

James Joyce – web links

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Project Gutenberg
A limited collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of the major works, religion, music, list of biographies, and external web links.

James Joyce on film James Joyce at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plus box office, technical credits, and quizzes.

James Joyce exhibition James Joyce Centre in Dublin
Exhibition centre, walking tours, lectures, and newsletter. The latest addition is a graphic novel version of ‘Ulysses’.

James Joyce web links The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection
University of Wisconsin – digitised scans of Finnegans Wake and out-of-print studies on Joyce’s language, plus rare critical studies.

James Joyce web links An Annotated Ulysses
An online version of Ulysses with hyperlinks giving explanations of obscure and classical references in the text.

James Joyce web links Cornell’s James Joyce Collection
Cornell University – a collection of letters, manuscripts, and books documenting the life and work of James Joyce on exhibition in 2005. Particularly strong on Joyce’s early life.

James Joyce web links A Bibliography of Scholarship and Criticism
Slightly dated but still useful web-based compilation of criticism and commentary – covers Joyce himself, plus the stories and novels.


James Joyce and Samuel Beckett

Very funny short film featuring James Joyce playing pitch and put with Samuel Beckett


The Cambridge Companion to James JoyceThe Cambridge Companion to James Joyce contains eleven essays by an international team of leading Joyce scholars. The topics covered include his debt to Irish and European writers and traditions, his life in Paris, and the relation of his work to the ‘modern’ spirit of sceptical relativism. One essay describes Joyce’s developing achievement in his earlier works (Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Another tackles his best-known text, asking the basic question ‘What is Ulysses about, and how can it be read?’ The issue of ‘difficulty’ raised by Finnegans Wake is directly addressed, and the reader is taken through questions of theme, language, structure and meaning, as well as the book’s composition and the history of Wake criticism.
The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce Buy the book here

© Roy Johnson 2010


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The New Bloomsday Book

May 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

A guide through James Joyce’s Ulysses

Anyone who has ever tried to read James Joyce’s Ulysses will know that it is a long, complex novel that is quite difficult to understand – especially on first acquaintance. But it is worth the effort, because it is also a twentieth-century masterpiece. The New Bloomsday Book by Joyce scholar Harry Blamires is designed to help you if you feel in need of support. It tells you what is going on from first page to last.

The New Bloomsday Book Ulysses, as its title suggests, is based loosely on Homer’s Odyssey, and Joyce made the events of his narrative, set on a single day in June 1914, parallel the events of the epic poem. Instead of Ulysses making his way home after fighting in the Trojan wars, Joyce’s hero Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman, after a day of wandering around Dublin, makes his way home to his wife Molly. But the subtelties and echoes are not always easy to pick up – so Blamires guides you through the story, explaining what is going on, and pointing out the Homeric parallels.

And he points out much more besides. Joyce’s novel is constructed from countless numbers of small cross references, echoes, allusions, and cultural leitmotivs. This has become a standard work of Joyce scholarship.

The ‘new’ in the title of this third edition refers to the fact that it now contains page numbering and references to the three most commonly used editions of the novel – the Oxford University Press ‘World Classics’ (1993), the Penguin ‘Twentieth-Century Classics’ (1992), and the controversial Gabler ‘Corrected Text’ (1986) editions.

It’s certainly a complete explanation, a summary of what ‘happens’ in the novel – but of course it cannot paraphrase the poetry and the glamour of the prose, whose style changes in almost every chapter – and in one memorable episode (Oxen of the Sun) within the chapter itself. As Blamires explains in his introduction to the novel’s opening chapter:

Joyce’s symbolism cannot be explained mechanically in terms of one-for-one parallels, for his correspondences are neither exclusive nor continuously persistent. Nevertheless certain correspondences recur throughout Ulysses, establishing themselves firmly. Thus Leopold Bloom corresponds to Ulysses in the Homeric Parallel, and Stephen Dedalus corresponds to Telemachus, Ulysses’s son. At the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey Telemachus finds himself virtually dispossessed by his mother’s suitors in his father’s own house, and he sets out in search of the lost Ulysses. In Joyce’s first episode Stephen Dedalus feels that he is pushed out by his supposed friends from his temporary residence, and leaves it intending not to return. The residence in question is the Martello tower on the beach at Sandycove, for which Stephen pays the rent.. Buck Mulligan, a medical student, shares it with him, and they have a resident visitor, Haines, an Englishman from Oxford.

Blamires explains all the allusions, symbols, and Homeric parallels as he goes along, whilst offering a paraphrase of the story. This will help readers to understand a dense and complex novel which might otherwise take several readings to unravel.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book, Abingdon: Routledge, 1996, pp.253, ISBN 0415138582


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The Short Story – essential works

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

tutorial and guide to important texts

The short story is as old as the earliest tale-telling. Many longer narratives such as epics and myths (such as the Bible) contain short episodes which can be extracted as stories. But as a distinct literary genre, the short story came into its own during the early nineteenth century. Many writers have created successful short stories – but those which follow are the prose artists who have had most influence on its development in terms of form. We will be adding more guidance notes and examples as time goes on.


Tales of Mystery & Imagination Edgar Allen Poe is famous for his Tales of Mystery and Imagination. These are tight, beautifully crafted exercises in plot, suspense, psychological drama, and sheer horror. He also invented the detective story. This is the birth of the modern short story. Poe was writing for magazines and journals. He has a spectacularly florid style, and his settings of dungeons and crumbling houses come straight out of the Gothic tradition. He’s most famous for stories such as ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Black Cat’, and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ which vividly dramatise extreme states of psychological terror, anxiety, and what we would now call existential threat. He also theorised about the story, claiming that every part should be contributing to the whole, and the story should be short enough to read at one sitting. This edition is good because it includes the best of the stories, plus some essays and reviews. An ideal starting point.
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How short is short?

There is no fixed length for a short story. Readers generally expect a character, an event of some kind, and a sense of resolution. But Virginia Woolf got most of this in to one page in her experimental short story Monday or Tuesday. There are also ‘abrupt fictions’ of a paragraph or two – but these tend to be not much more than anecdotes.

There’s an often recounted anecdote regarding a competition for the shortest possible short story. It was won by Ernest Hemingway with an entry of one sentence in six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

There are also quite long stories – such as those written by Henry James. If the narrative sticks to one character and one issue or episode, they remain stories. If they stray into greater degrees of complexity and develop expanded themes and dense structure – then they often become novellas. Examples of these include Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.


Hawthorne stories Nathaniel Hawthorne produced stories that are beautifully crafted studies in symbolism, moral ambiguity, and metaphors of the American psyche. His tales are full of characters oppressed by consciousness of sin, guilt, and retribution. They explore the traditions and the consequences of the Puritanism Europe exported to America. Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories in the Oxford University Press edition presents twenty of Hawthorne’s best tales. It’s the first in paperback to offer his most important short works with full annotation in one volume.
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A Day in the Country Guy de Maupassant brought the subject matter of the story down to an everyday level which shocked readers at the time – and can still do so now. He also began to downgrade the element of plot and suspense in favour of character revelation. He was a relative of Flaubert, a novelist manqué, and bon viveur who died at forty-three of syphilis in a madhouse. Nevertheless he left behind him an oeuvre of more than 300 stories. His tone is objective, detached, and often deeply ironic; and he is celebrated for the exactness and accuracy of his observations, and the balance and precision of his style. Although most of his stories appear at first to be nothing more than brief and rather transparent anecdotes, the best succeed in giving impressionistic but truthful insights into the hidden lives of people caught amidst the trials of everyday existence.
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Short Story Charles E. May, The Short Story: the reality of artifice, London: Routledge, 2002, pp.160, ISBN 041593883X. This is a study of the development of the short story as a literary genre – from its origins to the present day. It takes in most of the major figures – Poe, Hawthorn, James, Conrad, Hemingway, Borges, and Cheever. There’s also a very useful chronology, giving dates of significant publications, full notes and references. and annotated suggestions for further reading. Despite the obvious US weighting here, for anyone who needs an overview of the short story and an insight into how stories are analysed as part of undergraduate studies, this is an excellent place to start.
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Katherine Mansfield short storiesKatherine Mansfield is one of the few major writers who worked entirely within the short story form. Her finest work is available in just one volume. She followed Chekhov in paring down the dramatic element of the short story to a minimum, whilst raising its level of subtlety and psychological insight to new heights. Every smallest detail within her stories is carefully chosen to complete a pattern which the whole tale symbolises. She was also an early feminist in presenting many of her stories from a convincingly radical point of view. In this she was rather like her friend and contemporary, Virginia Woolf with whom she discussed the new literary techniques they were both developing at the same time. Unfortunately, Katherine Mansfield died at only thirty-five when she was at the height of her powers.
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James Joyce - Dubliners - book jacket James Joyce published Dubliners in 1916 and established himself immediately as a great writer. This has been an enormously influential collection which helped to establish the form of the modern short story. These are studies of Dublin life and characters written in a stark, pared-down style. Most of the characters and scenes are mean and petty – sometimes even tragic. Joyce had difficulty finding a publisher for this his first book, and it did not appear until many years after it had been written. It was severely attacked because the names of actual persons and places in Dublin are mentioned in it. Several of the characters introduced in Dubliners eventually reappear in his great novel Ulysses. In terms of literary technique, Joyce is best known for his use of the ‘epiphany’ – the revealing moment or experience used as a focal point for the purpose of the story.
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The Whiplash Ending

It used to be thought that the ‘point’ of a short story was best held back until the last paragraph. The idea was that the reader was being entertained – and then suddenly surprised by a revelation or an unexpected reversal or twist. O. Henry popularised this device in the US. However, most serious modern writers after Chekhov came to think that this was rather a cheap strategy. They proposed instead the relatively eventless story which presents a situation that unfolds itself to the reader for contemplation.


Virginia Woolf stories Virginia Woolf took the short story as it had come to be developed post-Chekhov, and with it she blended the prose poem, poetic meditations, and the plotless event. Her finest achievements in this form – Kew Gardens, Sunday or Monday, and The Lady in the Looking-glass‘ – create new linguistic worlds without the prop of a story line. These offer a poetic evocation of life and meditations on time, memory, and death. This edition contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is well presented and edited in a scholarly manner by Susan Dick.
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Metamorphosis Franz Kafka created stories and ‘fragments’ (as he called them) which are a strange, often nightmarish mixture of tale and philosophic meditation. Start with Metamorphosis – the account of a young salesman who wakes up to find he has been transformed into a giant insect. This particular collection also includes Kafka’s first publication – a slim volume of what he called ‘Meditations’ – as well as the forty-page ‘Letter to his Father’. It also contains the story in which he predicted the horrors of the concentration camps – ‘In the Penal Colony’. Kafka is famous for having anticipated in his work many of the modern states of psychological angst, alienation, and existential terror which became commonplace later in the century.
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Epiphanies and Moments

James Joyce’s contribution to the short story was a device he called the ‘epiphany’. Following Guy de Maupassant and Chekhov, he wrote the series of stories Dubliners which were pared down in terms of literary style and focussed their effect on a revelation. A sudden remark, a symbol, or moment epitomises and clarifies the meaning of a complex experience. This usually comes at the end of the story – either for the character in the story or for the reader. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf followed a similar route of playing down action and events in favour of dramatising insights into character and states of mind. Woolf called these ‘moments of being’.


Jorge Luis Borges - The Total Library Jorge Luis Borges like Katherine Mansfield, only wrote short stories. He was an Argentinian, much influenced by English Literature. His tales manage to combine literary playfulness and a rich style with strange explorations of mind-bending ideas. He is credited as one of the fathers of magical realism, which is one feature of Latin-American literature which has spread worldwide since the 1960s. His stories often start in a concrete, realistic world then gradually slide into strange dreamlike states and end up leaving you to wonder where on earth you are, and how you got there. Funes, the Memorious explores the idea of a man who cannot forget anything; The Garden of Forking Paths is a marvellous double-take on the detective story; and Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a pseudo-essay concerning encyclopedia entries of an imaginary world – which begin to invade and multiply within our own. He also wrote some rather amusing literary spoofs, which are collected in this edition.
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Ernest Hemingway trained as a newspaper reporter and began writing short stories in the post-Chekhov period, consciously influenced by his admiration for the Russian novelist Turgenev. He is celebrated for his terseness and understatement – a sort of literary tough-guy style which was much imitated at one time His persistent themes are physical and moral courage, stoicism, and what he called ‘grace under pressure’. Because his stories are so pared to the bone, free of all superfluous decoration, and so reliant on the closely observed detail, they fit well within the modernist style. He once won a bet that he could write a short story in six words. The result was – ‘For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.’ His reputation as a novelist has plummeted recently, but his stories are still worth reading.
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John Cheever is a story writer in the smooth and sophisticated New Yorker school. His writing is urbane, thoughtful, and his social details well observed. What he writes about are the small moments of enlightenment which lie waiting in everyday life, as well as the smouldering vices which lurk beneath the polite surface of suburban America. This is no doubt a reflection of Cheever’s own experience. For many years as a successful writer and family man he was also an alcoholic and led a secret double life as a homosexual. His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character’s decorous social persona and inner corruption. His is a literary approach which has given rise to many imitators, perhaps the best known of whom is Anne Tyler. He’s sometimes called ‘the Checkhov of the suburbs’.

Nadine GordimerNadine Gordimer is one of the few modern writers who have developed the short story as a literary genre beyond what Virginia Woolf pushed it to in the early modernist phase. She starts off in modern post-Chekhovian mode presenting situations which have little drama but which invite the reader to contemplate states of being or moods which illustrate the ideologies of South Africa. Technically, she experiments heavily with point of view, narrative perspective, unexplained incidents, switches between internal monologue and third person narrative and a heavy use of ‘as if’ prose where narrator-author boundaries become very blurred. Some of her stories became more lyrical, more compacted and symbolic, abandoning any semblance of conventional story or plot in favour of a poetic meditation on a theme. All of this can make enormous demands upon the reader. Sometimes, on first reading, it’s even hard to know what is going on. But gradually a densely concentrated image or an idea will emerge – the equivalent of a Joycean ‘epiphany’ – and everything falls into place. Her own collection of Selected Stories are UK National Curriculum recommended reading.
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© Roy Johnson 2004


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Filed Under: 19C Literature, 20C Literature, Literary studies, Short Stories, The Short Story Tagged With: Edgar Allen Poe, English literature, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Guy de Maupassant, James Joyce, John Cheever, Jorge Luis Borges, Katherine Mansfield, Literary studies, Nadine Gordimer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Short Story, Virginia Woolf

Ulysses

January 31, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, study resources, video, textual history

Ulysses (1922) is probably the greatest novel of the twentieth century, and certainly Joyce’s finest work. Taking Homer’s Odyssey as a structural framework, Joyce builds on it a complex narrative of Dublin characters on one day – Thursday 16 June 1904. Each chapter features a different prose-style to match its theme or subject. One chapter is even written in a manner which traces the history of English prose, from the Renaissance to modern advertising jargon.

James Joyce - portrait

James Joyce

It also includes two versions of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. This sought to reproduce the apparently chaotic manner in which our perceptions of the external world mingle themselves with ideas and memories in an undifferentiated and unstoppable river of thought. This includes the famous final chapter which is an unpunctuated eighty page soliloquy of Molly Bloom as she lies in bed at night, thinking over her life and the events of the previous day.

Rather like Picasso, Joyce had a multiplicity of styles, any one of which was enough to make lesser writers famous as they imitated him. Ulysses is a cornerstone of modern English Literature – written by an Irishman in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris.


Ulysses – plot summary

Ever since Stuart Gilbert published his explanation of the novel in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, it has been conventional to refer to the separate chapters of the book by the names of their originals in the Greek epic.

Telemachus
Stephen Dedalus spends the early morning hours of June 16, 1904, remaining aloof from his mocking friend, Buck Mulligan, and Buck’s English acquaintance, Haines. As Stephen leaves for work, Buck orders him to leave the house key and meet them at the pub at 12:30.

Nestor
Around 10:00 am, Stephen teaches a history lesson to his class at Garrett Deasy’s boys’ school. After class, Stephen meets with Deasy to receive his wages. The narrow-minded and prejudiced Deasy lectures Stephen on life. Stephen agrees to take Deasy’s editorial letter about cattle disease to acquaintances at the newspaper.

Proteus
Stephen spends the remainder of his morning walking alone on Sandymount Strand, thinking critically about his younger self and about perception. He composes a poem in his head and writes it down on a scrap torn from Deasy’s letter.

Calypso
At 8:00 am the same morning, Leopold Bloom fixes breakfast and brings his wife her mail and breakfast in bed. One of her letters is from Molly’s concert tour manager, Blazes Boylan. Bloom suspects he is also Molly’s lover. Bloom returns downstairs, reads a letter from their daughter, Milly, then goes to the outside lavatory.

The Lotus Eaters
At 10:00 am, Bloom picks up an amorous letter from the post office – he is corresponding with a woman named Martha Clifford under the pseudonym Henry Flower. He reads the tepid letter, ducks briefly into a church, then orders Molly’s lotion from the pharmacist. He runs into Bantam Lyons, who mistakenly gets the impression that Bloom is giving him a tip on the horse Throwaway in the afternoon’s Gold Cup race.

Hades
Around 11:00 am, Bloom rides with Simon Dedalus (Stephen’s father), Martin Cunningham, and Jack Power to the funeral of Paddy Dignam. The men treat Bloom as somewhat of an outsider. At the funeral, Bloom thinks about the deaths of his son and his father.

Aeolus
At noon, Bloom is at the offices of the Freeman newspaper, negotiating an advertisement for Keyes, a liquor merchant. Several idle men, including editor Myles Crawford, are hanging around in the office, discussing political speeches. Bloom leaves to secure the ad. Stephen arrives at the newspaper with Deasy’s letter. Stephen and the other men leave for the pub just as Bloom is returning.

Lestrygonians
At 1:00 pm, Bloom runs into Josie Breen, an old flame, and they discuss Mina Purefoy, who is in labour at the maternity hospital. Bloom stops in Burton’s restaurant, but he decides to move on to Davy Byrne’s for a light lunch. Bloom reminisces about an intimate afternoon with Molly on Howth. Bloom leaves and is walking toward the National Library when he spots Boylan on the street and ducks into the National Museum.

Scylla and Charybdis
At 2:00 pm Stephen is informally presenting his theory on Hamlet in the National Library to the poet AE and the librarians John Eglinton, Best, and Lyster. AE is dismissive of Stephen’s theory and leaves. Buck enters and jokingly scolds Stephen for failing to meet him and Haines at the pub. On the way out, Buck and Stephen pass Bloom, who has come to obtain a copy of Keyes’ ad.

The Wandering Rocks
This episode consists of nineteen short views of characters, major and minor, as they make their way around Dublin in the afternoon. Within each subsection, short, disjunctive paragraphs pop up that depict a simultaneous action in some other part of the city. It serves as an interlude between the first and last nine episodes.

Sirens
At 4:00 pm Simon Dedalus, Ben Dollard, Lenehan, and Blazes Boylan converge at the Ormond Hotel bar. Bloom notices Boylan’s car outside and decides to watch him. Boylan soon leaves for his appointment with Molly, and Bloom sits morosely in the Ormond restaurant – briefly mollified by Dedalus’s and Dollard’s singing. Bloom writes back to Martha, then leaves to post the letter.

Cyclops
At 5:00 pm Bloom arrives at Barney Kiernan’s pub to meet Martin Cunningham about the Dignam family finances, but Cunningham has not yet arrived. The citizen, a belligerent Irish nationalist, becomes increasingly drunk and begins attacking Bloom’s Jewishness. Bloom stands up to the citizen, speaking in favour of peace and love over xenophobic violence. Bloom and the citizen have an altercation on the street before Cunningham’s carriage carries Bloom away.

Nausicaa
Bloom relaxes on Sandymount Strand around sunset, after his visit to Mrs. Dignam’s house nearby. A young woman, Gerty MacDowell, notices Bloom watching her from across the beach. Gerty subtly reveals more and more of her legs while Bloom surreptitiously masturbates. Gerty leaves, and Bloom dozes.

Oxen of the Sun
At 10:00 pm Bloom wanders to the maternity hospital to check on Mina Purefoy. Also at the hospital are Stephen and several of his medical student friends, drinking and talking boisterously about subjects related to birth. Bloom agrees to join them, though he privately disapproves of their revelry in light of Mrs. Purefoy’s struggles upstairs. Buck arrives, and the men proceed to Burke’s pub. At closing time, Stephen convinces his friend Lynch to go to the brothel section of town and Bloom follows, feeling protective.

Circe
This episode takes the form of a play script with stage directions and descriptions. The majority of the action occurs only as drunken, subconscious, anxiety-ridden hallucinations. Bloom finally locates Stephen and Lynch at Bella Cohen’s brothel. Stephen is drunk and imagines that he sees the ghost of his mother – full of rage, he shatters a lamp with his walking stick. Bloom runs after Stephen and finds him in an argument with a British soldier who knocks him out.

Eumaeus
Bloom revives Stephen and takes him for coffee at a cabman’s shelter to sober up. They meet a sailor who regales them with traveller’s tales. There is also talk about Irish nationalism. Bloom invites Stephen back to his house.

Ithaca
Well after midnight, Stephen and Bloom arrive back at Bloom’s house. They drink cocoa and talk about their respective backgrounds. Bloom asks Stephen to stay the night. Stephen politely refuses. Bloom sees him out and comes back in to find evidence of Boylan’s visit. Still, Bloom is at peace with the world and he climbs into bed, tells Molly of his day and requests breakfast in bed.

Penelope
After Bloom falls asleep, Molly remains awake, surprised by Bloom’s request for breakfast in bed. Her mind wanders to her childhood in Gibraltar, her afternoon of sex with Boylan, her singing career, and Stephen Dedalus. Her thoughts of Bloom vary wildly over the course of the monologue, but it ends with a reminiscence of their intimate moment at Howth and a positive affirmation.


Sackville Street Dublin

Sackville Street, Dublin


Study resources

Red button Ulysses – Oxford University Press 1922 version – Amazon UK

Red button Ulysses – Oxford University Press 1922 version – Amazon US

Red button Ulysses – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Ulysses – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Red button Ulysses – 1967 film version by Joseph Strick – Amazon UK

Red button Ulysses – audio book (abridged) – Amazon UK

Red button Ulysses – the Hans Gabler ‘corrected’ text edition – Amazon UK

Red button Ulysses – Cliffs Notes – Amazon UK

Red button Ulysses – Annotated Notes edition – Amazon UK

Red button Ulysses – audioBook version at LibriVox

Red button James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ – an introduction and explanation – Amazon UK

Red button The New Bloomsday Book – chapter-by-chapter guide

Red button Ulysses – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

Pointer James Joyce: A Critical Guide – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce – Amazon UK

Red button James Joyce: Texts and Contexts – Amazon UK


Ulysses – a video introduction



Principal characters
Leopold Bloom a 38 year old Jewish Dublin newspaper advertising salesman
Marion (Molly) Bloom his 33 year old adulterous wife
Millicent Bloom their 15 year old daughter who does not appear in the novel
Rudy Bloom their son, who died 11 years ago
Stephen Dedalus aspiring poet in his early 20s
Simon Dedalus Stephen’s father, a drinker and singer
Malachi (Buck) Mulligan medical student and friend of Stephen’s
Hugh (Blazes) Boylan concert manager and Molly’s lover
Martha Clifford Bloom’s secret correspondent, a sexual tease
Bella Cohen a brothel keeper
Garret Deasy headmaster at school where Stephen teaches
Patrick Dignam a friend of Bloom who has recently died
Joe Hynes a reporter for Bloom’s newspaper
Minna Kennedy
Lydia Douce
flirtatious barmaids at the Ormond hotel
Ned Lambert a friend of Stephen Dedalus and others
Gerty MacDowell lame girl who flashes for Bloom
Kitty Ricketts prostitute working in Bella’s brothel
the citizen a belligerent Irish nationalist

Ulysses

Ulysses – first edition


Ulysses – textual history

The writing and publication history of Ulysses is almost as complicated as the novel itself. Joyce composed the novel over a seven year period between 1914 and 1921. Extracts from it first began to appear in the American magazine The Little Review from 1918, but publication was halted when the Nausicaa episode led to prosecution. At a trial in 1921, the magazine was declared obscene and as a result Ulysses was banned in the United States.

The first publication in book form was in France in February 1922 where the American Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company had 1,000 copies printed. The novel quickly became notorious, and copies were smuggled across the Channel into England.

Ulysses - manuscript One factor which complicates the textual history of the novel is that Joyce continued working on it, even after it had been published. The printer in Dijon had made errors; Ezra Pound had made cuts and changes to the episodes in circulation via magazines, and Joyce revised multiple copies of his work which had been produced by non-professional typists from his near-illegible handwritten manuscripts.

Joyce had an English patroness Harriet Shaw Weaver who paid for the publication of an English edition by the Egoist Press in October 1922. This contained so many typographical errors that it was issued with an apology from the publisher. When 500 copies were sent to America they were seized by the government authorities, and when the publisher ordered replacements, these were impounded and burned by the customs office at Folkstone.

Such was the book’s notoriety that pirated editions began to appear. In America, publisher Samuel Roth reprinted fourteen bowdlerized episodes and issued them in two volumes, complete with his own preface. When this aroused a protest from writers and artists in America and the UK, he retorted by printing a photographic forgery of the Shakespeare and Company edition

The ban on Ulysses was finally lifted in the United States in December 1933, the same week as prohibition was repealed. Random House published the first American edition in 1934, but this was based upon a pirated earlier edition which contained lots of typographical errors. The first authorised English edition was published by Bodley Head in 1936.

Various new editions appeared on both sides of the Atlantic in the years that followed, but all of them were based on earlier, flawed versions. As the date for the expiry of Joyce’s copyright began to draw near (in 1992, fifty years after his death) a number of publishers rushed to issue new editions. What they hoped to do was compile a clean and error-free version which could be copyrighted as ‘the definitive’ edition, and thus secure for them a lucrative monopoly for the next fifty years.

Ulysses The most spectacular of these attempts was that piloted by the German scholar Hans Walter Gabler, who proposed to ‘recover’ the original text by comparing surviving manuscripts, corrected proofs, and existing editions. He produced what was called a synoptic version, which was issued as Ulysses: The Corrected Text in 1986. This was designed to put an end to all uncertainties regarding the accuracy of the text.

But in 1988 an American scholar John Kidd published a blistering critique of Gabler and his work in The New York Review of Books. This pointed out flaws in Gabler’s methodology, listed weaknesses in his interpretation, and exposed new mistakes in the supposedly ‘corrected’ version. A huge academic argument ensued, conducted in the full light of public gaze. Scholarly opinion gradually turned against Gabler, and publishers in the UK and America have quietly withdrawn his edition.

In the meantime, the law on copyright has changed, the James Joyce estate has refused to authorise any further definitive editions, and various publishers have been issuing reprints of earlier editions, from that of 1922 onwards – so confusion continues to reign. As Joyce himself prophetically observed, “Ulysses [will] give Universities something to work on well into the next century.” Which is exactly the current state of affairs.


Dublin 1915

Dublin 1915


Further reading

Pointer Anthony Burgess, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce, Andre Deutsch, 1973.

Pointer Robert H. Deming (ed), James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 2 Vols, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1970.

Pointer Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, 1959.

Pointer Richard Ellmann and Stuart Gilbert (eds), The Letters of James Joyce, 3 Vols, Faber, 1957-66.

Pointer Seon Givens, James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, New York: Vanguard Press, 1963.

Pointer Suzette A. Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1990.

Pointer Harry Levin, James Joyce: a Critical Introduction, New York: New Directions, 1960.

Pointer Colin MacCabe (ed), James Joyce: New Perspectives, Harvester, 1982.

Pointer W.J. McCormack and Alistair Stead (eds), James Joyce and Modern Literature, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1982.

Pointer Dominic Maganiello, Joyce’s Politics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

Pointer Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce, Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Pointer C.H. Peake, James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist, Arnold, 1977.

Pointer Jean-Michel Rabaté, Joyce Upon the Void, Macmillan, 1991.

Pointer Lee Spinks, James Joyce: A Critical Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009

Pointer W.Y. Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce, Thames and Hudson, 1959.


Trinity College Dublin

Trinity College Dublin (TCD)


Other works by James Joyce

James Joyce greatest works A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce’s first complete novel – a largely autobiographical account of a young man’s struggle with Catholicism and his desire to forge himself as an artist. It features a prose style whose complexity develops in parallel with the growth of the hero, Stephen Dedalus. The early pages are written from a child’s point of view, but then they quickly become more sophisticated. As Stephen struggles with religious belief and the growth of his sexual feelings as a young adult, the prose become more complex and philosophical. In addition to the account of his personal life and a critique of Irish society at the beginning of the last century, it also incorporates the creation of an aesthetic philosophy which was unmistakably that of Joyce himself. The novel ends with Stephen quitting Ireland for good, just as Joyce himself was to do – never to return.
James Joyce greatest works A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Buy the book at Amazon UK
James Joyce greatest works A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Buy the book at Amazon US

 

James Joyce greatest works UlyssesUlysses (1922) is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and it is certainly Joyce’s most celebrated work. He takes Homer’s Odyssey as a structural framework and uses it as the base to create a complex story of characters moving around Dublin on a single day in June 1904. Each separate chapter is written in a different prose style to reflect its theme or subject. The novel also includes two forms of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. This was Joyce’s attempt to reproduce the apparently random way in which our perceptions of the world are mixed with our conscious ideas and memories in an unstoppable flow of thought. There is a famous last chapter which is an eighty page unpunctuated soliloquy of a woman as she lies in bed at night, mulling over the events of her life and episodes from the previous day.
James Joyce greatest works Ulysses Buy the book at Amazon UK
James Joyce greatest works Ulysses Buy the book at Amazon US


James Joyce – web links

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Project Gutenberg
A limited collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

James Joyce web links James Joyce at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of the major works, religion, music, list of biographies, and external web links.

James Joyce on film James Joyce at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plus box office, technical credits, and quizzes.

James Joyce exhibition James Joyce Centre in Dublin
Exhibition centre, walking tours, lectures, and newsletter. The latest addition is a graphic novel version of ‘Ulysses’.

James Joyce web links The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection
University of Wisconsin – digitised scans of Finnegans Wake and out-of-print studies on Joyce’s language, plus rare critical studies.

James Joyce web links An Annotated Ulysses
An online version of Ulysses with hyperlinks giving explanations of obscure and classical references in the text.

James Joyce web links Cornell’s James Joyce Collection
Cornell University – a collection of letters, manuscripts, and books documenting the life and work of James Joyce on exhibition in 2005. Particularly strong on Joyce’s early life.

James Joyce web links A Bibliography of Scholarship and Criticism
Slightly dated but still useful web-based compilation of criticism and commentary – covers Joyce himself, plus the stories and novels.

© Roy Johnson 2010


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Filed Under: James Joyce Tagged With: English literature, James Joyce, Literary studies, study guide, The novel, Ulysses

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