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James Joyce (1882-1941) 
James Joyce is regarded as the most original and influential writer of 
the twentieth century. Irishman by birth, he exercised a considerable 
influence upon modern English and American literature. 
He was born in Dublin, the eldest of a family of ten children. His father 
was a civil servant, continually in financial difficulties. For several years 
Joyce attended Clongowes Wood College, before his family’s increasing 
poverty made this impossible. He later attended University College, Dublin, 
where he was a brilliant scholar, accomplished in Latin, French, Italian and 
Norwegian.
While he was still an undergraduate he began writing lyrical poems, 
which were collected in “Chamber Music” (1907). Upon graduation from 
the University in 1902, Joyce lived for a time in Paris where he contributed 
book reviews to Dublin newspapers. After a brief return to Dublin for his 
mother’s burial, he moved to the continent with Nora Barnacle to spend the 
rest of his life in Paris, Trieste, Rome and Zurich. 
In 1909 and 1912, Joyce made his last two trips to Ireland to arrange the publication of a 
collection of fifteen stories “Dubliners”, the dominant mood of which is realistic. This work was 
published only in 1914. Joyce said that his purpose in writing the short stories collected in 
“Dubliners” was to produce “a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for 
the scene because the city seemed to me the center of paralysis”. He wanted to give “the Irish 
people ... one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass”. The style of
“Dubliners” marks a sharp break with the fiction of the nineteenth century. Joyce located the center 
of the action in the minds of his characters. Incident and plot are subordinated to psychological 
revelation. Each word and detail has a calculated purpose, and the meaning of the story is presented 
as an 
epiphany
- a moment of heightened awareness that can occur as a result of a trivial encounter, 
object, or event. For example, in “Araby”, one of “Dubliners” short stories, epiphany occurs in the 
final paragraph and runs as following “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature 
driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”
In 1916 his partly autobiographical novel “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and in 
1922 his most famous novel “Ulysses” were published.
“Ulysses” is a dazzling original attempt to tell the story of group of Dubliners on a single day and at 
the same time present a symbolic view of human history. Seven hundred pages of the novel relate 
of one day in the life of two Dubliners who are not acquainted. Leopold Bloom, an advertising 
agent, and Stephen Dedalus, a poet and teacher, ramble in the streets of Dublin; the paths of these 
two men cross and re-cross through the day and finally they meet only for a leave-taking. The book 
is built on parallel from Homer’s Odyssey, i.e. each chapter revives an incident from Homer’s epic 
and each character has a Homeric prototype.
In “Ulysses”, rendering the workings of his character’s minds, Joyce introduced the so-called 
stream-of-consciousness technique recording the flow of their thoughts and sensations with all the 
complex associations attached to them. The remaining seventeen years of his life Joyce worked on 
his next novel “Finnegans Wake” (1939). This book carried the stylistic experimentation of 
“Ulysses” further.