Ulysses

Ulysses is a modernist novel by James Joyce. It was first serialized in The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920 and later published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922. Originally, Joyce conceived of Ulysses as a short story to be included in Dubliners, but decided instead to publish it as a long novel, situated as a sort of sequel to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, picking up Stephen Dedalus’s life over a year later. Ulysses takes place on a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin.

Within the massive text of 265,000 words (not so “short” anymore, eh?), divided in 18 episodes, Joyce radically shifts narrative style with each new episode, completely abandoning the previously accepted notions of plot, setting, and characters. The presentation of a fragmented reality through interior perception in Ulysses, often through stream-of-consciousness, is one of many reasons it is a paramount of Modernist literature. 

Ulysses presents a series of parellels with Homer’s epic poem Odyssey (Ulysses is the Latinized name of Odysseus.) Not only can correspondences be drawn between the main characters of each text — Stephen Dedalus to Telemachus, Leopold Bloom to Odysseus, and Molly Bloom to Penelope, but each of the 18 episodes of Ulysses reflects an adventure from the Odyssey.

 In 1998, the American publishing firm Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

There have been at least 18 editions and variations in different impressions of each edition, though some are certainly more notable than others. Harriet Weaver of the Egoist Press published the first “English edition” of Ulysses later in 1922. Following the publication of this edition, the text was banned and the novel forced underground. In 1933, Random House successfully applied to the US courts to overturn the ban and published its first American edition in January 1935. However, a pirated Roth edition was published in New York in 1929. Other notable editions include the first U.K. Edition, published by John Lane / the Bodley Head in London in 1936, the first U.S. Random House edition of 1935 and the Limited Editions Club edition of 1935 (with illustrations by Henry Matisse).