Banned in the United States and United Kingdom throughout the 1920s, Ulysses turned conventional ideas of the novel inside out with its bold new form, style and theme. Deeply rooted in the Greek myth of the hero of the Trojan War, Joyce bases his novel on Ulysses or Odysseus, who is doomed to voyage for ten years before returning home to Ithaca. Joyce had been deeply influenced by the Iliad and the Odyssey, which he had read from Charles Lamb's adaptations as a child. In fact, he considered him the epitome of the heroic ideal and constantly thought of giving the myth a new dimension in modern literature.

However, the reader must be cautioned that it is not an easy bo...

His family name is derived from a Greek craftsman who created the Labyrinth and designed wings for himself and his son to fly away from the island they were imprisoned in. But Stephen Dedalus, the young hero of James Joyce's first novel, is a young man who rises above his baser instincts and seeks a life devoted to the arts.

This quintessential coming of age novel describes the early life of Stephen Dedalus. It is set in Ireland during the nineteenth century which was a time of emerging Irish nationalism and conservative Catholicism. Highly autobiographical in nature, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man draws heavily on real events and characters from Joyce's own l...

This novella is the final story in Joyce’s collection Dubliners. It describes a Christmas party given by Kate and Julia Morkan, two elderly Dublin ladies, that is attended by their nephew, Gabriel Conroy, and his wife. While the party is festive, full of dancing, drinking, and eating, it is also pervaded by political, religious, and sexual tensions, as well as memories of loss. When Gabriel and his wife go home at the end of the night, she reveals a long-kept secret that leads to an epiphany.

A young boy falls in love with his friend's much older sister and is desperate to get her the perfect gift from the Araby Fair.

After a party, a man discovers something he had never known about his wife, which has a devastating impact on their marriage.

An ambitious mother schemes to get her daughter a role in a series of concerts.

A drunken legal clerk takes out his frustrations on his helpless young son.

These and other brilliant stories are contained in the collection entitled Dubliners. Published in 1914 during the height of the Irish Nationalist Movement, the fifteen stories are an invaluable record of the life and times of the middle...

Exiles is a play by James Joyce, who is principally remembered for his novels. It was rejected by W. B. Yeats for production by the Abbey Theatre. Its first major London performance was in 1970, when Harold Pinter directed it at the Mermaid Theatre. The basic premise of Exiles involves a love triangle between Richard Rowan (a Dublin writer recently returned from exile in Rome), Bertha (his common law wife) and his old friend Robert Hand (a journalist). (There are obvious parallels to be drawn with Joyce's own life – Joyce and Nora Barnacle lived, unmarried, in Trieste, during the years the fictional Rowans were living in Rome, while Robert Hand is roughly the same age of Joyce's friends O...

Ulysses is a groundbreaking novel in which Irish author James Joyce explores realism through stream-of-consciousness technique and shifting narrative styles. It was published in serial form between 1918-1920 and first published in book form in 1922. The story follows Leopold Bloom through Dublin during the course of one day: June 16, 1904. The events and characters of Ulysses parallel those of Homer's Odyssey, with Bloom corresponding to Odysseus. Although the book was the subject of early obscenity prosecutions, was banned in several countries, and has been considered unreadable by many, it is nevertheless one of the most important English-language works of the 2...

Chamber Music is a collection of poems by James Joyce, first published in May of 1907. The collection originally comprised thirty-four love poems, but two further poems were added before publication (”All day I hear the noise of waters” and “I hear an army charging upon the land”).

Although the poems did not sell well, they received some critical acclaim. Ezra Pound admired the “delicate temperament” of these early poems, while Yeats described “I hear an army charging upon the land” as “a technical and emotional masterpiece”. In 1909, Joyce wrote to his wife, “When I wrote [Chamber Music], I was a lonely boy, walking about by myself at night and thinking that one day a g...