Ulysses is a modernist novel by James Joyce. It was first
serialized in The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920 and later
published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922. Originally, Joyce conceived of
Ulysses as a short story to be included in Dubliners, but decided instead to
publish it as a long novel, situated as a sort of sequel to A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, picking up Stephen Dedalus’s life over a year later.
Ulysses takes place on a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin.
Within the massive text of 265,000 words (not so “short”
anymore, eh?), divided in 18 episodes, Joyce radically shifts narrative style
with each new episode, completely abandoning the previously accepted notions of
plot, setting, and characters. The presentation of a fragmented reality through
interior perception in Ulysses, often through stream-of-consciousness, is one
of many reasons it is a paramount of Modernist literature.
Ulysses presents a series of parellels with Homer’s epic
poem Odyssey (Ulysses is the Latinized name of Odysseus.) Not only can
correspondences be drawn between the main characters of each text — Stephen
Dedalus to Telemachus, Leopold Bloom to Odysseus, and Molly Bloom to Penelope,
but each of the 18 episodes of Ulysses reflects an adventure from the Odyssey.
In 1998, the
American publishing firm Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the
100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. ...
(US)
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