Ulysses

Ulysses, a novel by J. Joyce, serialized in the Little Review from 1918. The editors of the Little Review were prosecuted and found guilty of publishing obscenity, which led to the novel's publication in a non-English speaking country: it was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach in 1922. Copies of the first English edition were burned by the New York post office authorities, and the Folkestone customs authorities seized the second edition in 1923. Various later editions appeared abroad, and, after the United States District Court found the book not obscene in 1933, the first English edition appeared in 1936, and the first unlimited edition in America and England in 1937.

The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16 June 1904 (the anniversary of Joyce's first walk with Nora Barnacle, who became his wife), now known as ‘Bloomsday’. The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus (the hero of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man); Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertisement canvasser; and his wife, Molly. The plot follows the wanderings of Stephen and Bloom through Dublin, and their eventual meeting. The last chapter is a monologue by Molly Bloom. The various chapters roughly correspond to the episodes of Homer's Odyssey: Stephen representing Telemachus, Bloom Odysseus, and Molly Penelope. In the course of the story a public bath, a funeral, a newspaper office, a library, public houses, a maternity hospital, and a brothel are visited. The style is highly allusive and employs a variety of techniques, especially those of the stream of consciousness and of parody, and ranges from extreme realism to fantasy.