Ulysses

Description

Set entirely on one day, 16 June 1904, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus as they go about their daily business in Dublin. From this starting point, James Joyce constructs a novel of extraordinary imaginative richness and depth. Unique in the history of literature, Ulysses is one of the most important and enjoyable works of the twentieth century.

After its first publication in Paris in 1922, Ulysses was published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head in 1936. These editions, as well as the subsequent resettings of 1960 in Great britain and of 1961 in the US, included an increasing number of transmission and printing errors. In 1977 a team of scholars, led by Professor Hans Walter Gabler, began to study manuscript evidence, typescripts and proofs in an attempt to reconstruct Joyce’s creative process in order to come up with a more accurate text.

This edition uses the revised 1993 text of Gabler’s version.Ulysses changed the stakes of the novel for ever, letting us see how extraordinary the everyday can be by plugging us straight into the minds of its characters, and using language in an electrifying way that only poets had dared to up till then—New Statesman

The greatest novel of the century—Anthony Burgess, Observer

The Odyssey, the Divine Comedy and Hamlet whisper their way through its pages: and Ulysses is their equal at every turn—Simon Barnes, The Times

Ulysses, with its comic-epic tapestry, took fiction deeper than ever into the raucous carnival of everyday life—Independent

Dirty, blasphemous and unreadable, or one of the greatest novels of the 20th century? No matter what your opinion of it, Ulysses has had a profound influence on modern fiction… Unforgettable—GuardianJames Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 in Dublin. He studied modern languages at University College, Dublin. After graduating, Joyce moved to Paris for a brief period in 1902. In 1904 Joyce met Nora Barnacle, with whom he would spend the rest of his life and they moved to Europe and settled in Trieste where Joyce worked as a teacher. His first published work was a book of poems called Chamber Music (1907). This was followed by Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and the play Exiles (1918). In 1915 the First World War forced Joyce and Nora and their two children to move to Zürich. Joyce’s most famous novel, Ulysses, was published in Paris in 1922. In the same year he started work on his last great book, Finnegan’s Wake (1939). James Joyce died in Zürich on 13 January 1941.

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday’s Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and six novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, which was the Bord Gáis Energy Novel of the Year and won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, and in 2018 she received the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature.GB

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