James Joyce's most celebrated novel, and one of the most highly regarded novels in the English language, records the events of one day-Thursday the 16th of June, 1904-in the city of Dublin.
The reader is first reintroduced to Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce's previous novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen is now living in a rented Martello tower and working at a school, having completed his B.A. and a period of attempted further study in Paris. The focus then shifts to the book's protagonist, Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser and social outsider.
While containing a richly detailed story and still being generally described as a novel, Ulysses breaks many of the bounds otherwise associated with the form. It consists of eighteen chapters, or "episodes," each somehow echoing a scene in Homer's Odyssey. Each episode takes place in a different setting, and each is written in a different, and often unusual, style.
Ulysses is known not only for its formal novelty and linguistic inventiveness, but for its storied publication history. The first fourteen episodes of the book were serialized between 1918 and 1920 in The Little Review. In 1921, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice won a trial regarding obscenity in the thirteenth episode, "Nausicaa," and Ulysses would not appear again in America until 1934.
After lamenting to Sylvia Beach, owner of the Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company, that it might never be published at all, Beach offered to publish it in Paris, and Ulysses first appeared in its entirety in February 1922.
The novel's initial reception was mixed. W. B. Yeats called it "mad," but would later agree with the positive assessments of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Virginia Woolf derided it as "underbred." Joyce's aunt rejected it as "unfit to read," to which Joyce famously retorted that if that were so, then life was not fit to live.
The sheer density of references in the text make Ulysses a book that virtually demands of the reader access to critical interpretation. Today it is considered by many to be the zenith of 20th century literature: both one of the richest, and also the most difficult, books to ever be written.
This Standard Ebooks edition is based on a transcription of the 1922 Shakespeare and Company first edition, with emendations from pre-1929 errata lists and the second edition in its 1927 ninth printing. It does not track any one particular edition, but rather is a blend of pre-1929 editions that aims to contain what scholars might consider to be the most accurate version of what was printed before 1929.
Perfect for readers who appreciate groundbreaking literary artistry and aren't afraid of a challenging read, this modernist masterpiece revolutionized the novel form with its innovative stream-of-consciousness technique and profound psychological depth. Joyce's brilliant portra