Novel
Ulysses
James Joyce · 1922
Synopsis
A single day in Dublin, 16 June 1904. Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser, crosses the city knowing he is being deceived: in the afternoon, his wife Molly is to receive her impresario, Blazes Boylan, at their home. Elsewhere wanders the young Stephen Dedalus, an apprentice writer and teacher. The novel follows their thoughts very closely, and each of its episodes echoes a book of the Greek epic of Ulysses' homecoming.
Context
The novel was written over seven years, during the war and after, and its author dates it to the day of his first outing with Nora Barnacle. Episodes appeared from 1918 in the Little Review of New York, which was convicted of obscenity in 1921 over the publication of one of them. Sylvia Beach published it in Paris, at Shakespeare and Company, on 2 February 1922. Banned in the United States until Judge Woolsey's decision of 6 December 1933, which found it sometimes emetic but nowhere aphrodisiac, it did not appear in the United Kingdom until 1936.
Who it is for
A long novel, in eighteen episodes, each in a different form; two French translations, the first revised with the author.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as a monument of modernism; the day on which the novel is set is celebrated every year around the world under the name of Bloomsday.