Ulysses Synopsis
'It is not that Ulysses excludes us; it is, rather, that it includes us in ways that no other work prepares us for. The question is not 'what is a novel?', but what can a novel be? Ulysses is the answer'
Patrick McGuinness from his preface to Ulysses: The Restored Text
Initially rejected by several printers in Dublin and London for containing 'obscene' content, Ulysses was first published in book form in a limited-edition printing of 1000 copies by Shakespeare and Company in Paris in 1922. A subsequent printing was impounded by US customs and for a period the novel was famed for its notoriety rather than its literary achievement.
Like its author, Ulysses exists in a complicated push-pull relationship with its language - English - and its setting - Ireland. Joyce returns to the themes that had preoccupied him in previous works, including nationalism and empire, religion, identity and sex in a novel which gloriously brings Dublin on June 16th 1904 to the page.
This edition of Ulysses: The Restored Text includes the revisions that Joyce made to the novel during his lifetime.
About This Edition
About James Joyce
James Joyce was born on 2 February 1882, the eldest of ten surviving children. He was educated by Jesuits at Clogowes Wood College and at Belvedere College (just up the road from the Centre) before going on to University College, then located on St Stephen’s Green, where he studied modern languages. After he graduated from university, Joyce went to Paris, ostensibly to study medicine, and was recalled to Dublin in April 1903 because of the illness and subsequent death of his mother. He stayed in Ireland until 1904, and in June that year he met Nora Barncale, the Galway woman who was to become his partner and later his wife.
Joyce’s last and perhaps most challenging work, Finnegans Wake was published on 4 May 1939. It was immediately listed as “the book of the week” in the UK and the USA. Joyce died at the age of fifty-nine, on 13 January 1941, at 2 a.m., in Schwesterhaus vom Roten Kreuz in Zurich where he and his family had been given asylum . He is buried in Fluntern cemetary, Zurich.
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