Chamber Music (1907)
His first book, a collection of poems
Literature · Novelists
James Joyce
1882–1941 · Irish
Modernism; stream of consciousness
James Joyce was a Dublin-born modernist who spent most of his adult life abroad in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, yet set all his major fiction in Dublin. Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man were followed by Ulysses (1922), which transposes Homer's Odyssey onto a single Dublin day, 16 June 1904. His final work, Finnegans Wake, pushed language experiment to its limit.
How to spot them
- ▸Bloomsday, 16 June 1904; Leopold and Molly Bloom; Stephen Dedalus
- ▸Buck Mulligan and the Martello tower at Sandycove
- ▸Molly Bloom's closing soliloquy ending 'yes I said yes I will Yes'
- ▸Finnegans Wake: 'riverrun', HCE and Anna Livia Plurabelle; the source of the physicist's 'quark'
- ▸Published in Paris by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company
Key works
Dubliners (1914)
Fifteen stories of Dublin life, including 'Araby', 'Eveline' and 'The Dead'
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Stephen Dedalus grows up and resolves to leave Ireland for art, using 'silence, exile, and cunning'
Exiles (1918)
His only surviving play
Ulysses (1922)
Leopold Bloom's wanderings through Dublin on 16 June 1904, in 18 episodes paralleling the Odyssey
Finnegans Wake (1939)
Dream-language novel of the Earwicker family, whose last sentence runs into its first
Key ideas
- Epiphany: a sudden revelation of the essence of an ordinary moment, a key idea in his early fiction
- Ulysses maps Homer's Odyssey onto Dublin: Bloom as Ulysses, Stephen as Telemachus, Molly as Penelope
- Pioneered interior monologue and stream of consciousness, climaxing in Molly Bloom's unpunctuated 'Penelope' episode
Quick-fire facts
- •Educated by the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College, then at University College Dublin
- •Bloomsday, 16 June, commemorates the date in 1904 of his first outing with Nora Barnacle, whom he later married
- •Ulysses was published in Paris on 2 February 1922, his 40th birthday, by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company
- •Ulysses was banned in the United States until Judge John Woolsey ruled it not obscene in 1933
- •Buck Mulligan in Ulysses is based on Oliver St John Gogarty
- •Murray Gell-Mann took the word 'quark' from the line 'Three quarks for Muster Mark!' in Finnegans Wake
- •Suffered severe eye problems throughout his life; died in Zurich in January 1941 and is buried in Fluntern Cemetery
- •Finnegans Wake was known as 'Work in Progress' while it appeared in instalments
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Sources
- British Library — James Joyce
- Richard Ellmann — James Joyce