The Irish Ulysses

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

This carefully crafted ebook: "ULYSSES (Modern Classics Series)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is considered to be one of the most important works of modernist literature, and has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement". Ulysses chronicles the peripatetic appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. Ulysses is the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic poem Odyssey, and the novel establishes a series of parallels between its characters and events and those of the poem (the correspondence of Leopold Bloom to Odysseus, Molly Bloom to Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus to Telemachus). Joyce divided Ulysses into 18 chapters or "episodes". At first glance much of the book may appear unstructured and chaotic; Joyce once said that he had "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant", which would earn the novel "immortality". James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses, the short-story collection Dubliners, and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake.

Marking the centenary of Ireland's - and possibly the world's - most famous novel, this joyful introductory guide opens up Ulysses to a whole new readership, offering insight into the literary, historical, and cultural elements at play in James Joyce's masterwork. Both eloquent and erudite, this book is an initiation into the wonders of Joyce's writing and of the world that inspired it, written by Daniel Mulhall, Ireland's ambassador to the United States and an advocate for Irish literature around the world. One hundred years on from that novel's first publication, Ulysses: A Reader's Odyssey takes us on a journey through one of the twentieth century's greatest works of fiction. Exploring the eighteen chapters of the novel and using the famous structuring principle of Homer's Odyssey as our guide, Daniel Mulhall releases Ulysses from its reputation of impenetrability, and shows us the pleasure it can offer us as readers.

"This book was crying out to be written." The Irish Times "Scandalously readable." Literary Review James Joyce's relationship with his homeland was a complicated and often vexed one. The publication of his masterwork Ulysses - referred to by The Quarterly Review as an "Odyssey of the sewer" - in 1922 was initially met with indifference and hostility within Ireland. This book tells the full story of the reception of Joyce and his best-known book in the country of his birth for the first time; a reception that evolved over the next hundred years, elevating Joyce from a writer reviled to one revered. Part reception study, part social history, this book uses the changing interpretations of Ulysses to explore the concurrent religious, social and political changes sweeping Ireland. From initially being a threat to the status quo, Ulysses became a way to market Ireland abroad and a manifesto for a better, more modern, open and tolerant, multi-ethnic country.

"This is the most comprehensive and original of the studies dealing with Joyce's response to the idea of God accepted in Ireland and to the sacred images and rituals prevalent there. It shows how in Ulysses he undermines and exploits the crucial elements of his rejected faith: how he recalls the omnipotent Father to reveal his artistic powers, the incarnated Son to celebrate his own human images, and the consecrated host to imply his hidden spiritual presence." "Frederick K. Lang has closely analyzed both Joyce's texts and his sources, including important sources previously unidentified. First, he reveals that Joyce's transubstantiation of theology and liturgy in Ulysses is foreshadowed in his first short story. There, by setting the Latin Mass in an Irish home, Joyce casts doubt upon the Church's ability to transform matter, and, in his revised version of the story, he casts further doubt by including parallels with the Greek liturgy, a rite he regarded as subversive of the Latin Mass. Next, Lang reinterprets Joyce's theory of literary art in light of its specific origins in Aquinas and the New Testament, and in doing so he reveals the precise meaning of the term "epiphany." He proceeds to demonstrate that the earlier theory, including the concept of epiphany, underlies the Hamlet theory, and that the famous reference to "love" is linked to God's narcissism and creativity. How the literary artist resembles God is implied not only in the Hamlet theory but in the references to orthodox and heretical views of the Father-Son relation and the Eucharist, views that explain Joyce's reincarnation as both Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom." "In Ulysses the word "reincarnation" has an additional meaning. Not only does Joyce's soul assume new flesh, but so does the Word of God. Along with the feast of Christ celebrated in Ireland on 16 June 1904, the novel assimilates first the Mass, then the black mass, and finally the Good Friday liturgy. At the end of Ulysses, Molly Bloom emerges as "the genuine christine" prophecied on the first page. Joyce's offering of her body, blood, and water evokes both the Crucifixion and the Eucharist, and thus makes flesh a Gospel read in Irish churches on the day he chose as Bloomsday." "This book is lucid and provocative. Free of theory and jargon, it not only gives Joyce scholars fresh information and new interpretations, but would interest and enlighten any reader of Ulysses."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In Ulysses and Us, Declan Kiberd argues that James Joyce's Ulysses offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. As much a guide to contemporary life as it is virtuoso work of literary criticism, Ulysses and Us offers revolutionary insights to the scholar and the first-time reader alike. Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the hero of James Joyce's Ulysses, teaches the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the city streets, and in his apparently banal way sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of the literature upon which Joyce drew in writing Ulysses, such as Homer, Dante and the Bible. 'Declan Kiberd's brilliantly informed and highly entertaining advocacy liberates Joyce's greatest book from the dungeon of unreadable masterpieces.' Joseph O'Connor

A collection of essays commemorating the 1922 publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. Includes contributions by preeminent Joyce scholars and by curators of his manuscripts and early editions.

This edition offers everything needed by the newcomer to this famous but intimating text: images, maps, footnotes, and introductory essays by eighteen leading Joyceans.