James Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 in Dublin. He studied modern languages at University College, Dublin. After graduating, Joyce moved to Paris for a brief period in 1902. In 1904 Joyce met Nora Barnacle, with whom he would spend the rest of his life and they moved to Europe and settled in Trieste where Joyce worked as a teacher. His first published work was a book of poems called Chamber Music (1907). This was followed by Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and the play Exiles (1918). In 1915 the First World War forced Joyce and Nora and their two children to move to Zürich. Joyce’s most famous novel, Ulysses, was published in Paris in 1922. In the same year he started work on his last great book, Finnegan’s Wake (1939). James Joyce died in Zürich on 13 January 1941.

Synopsis

Set entirely on one day, 16 June 1904, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus as they go about their daily business in Dublin. From this starting point, James Joyce constructs a novel of extraordinary imaginative richness and depth. Unique in the history of literature, Ulysses is one of the most important and enjoyable works of the twentieth century.

After its first publication in Paris in 1922, Ulysses was published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head in 1936. These editions, as well as the subsequent resettings of 1960 in Great britain and of 1961 in the US, included an increasing number of transmission and printing errors. In 1977 a team of scholars, led by Professor Hans Walter Gabler, began to study manuscript evidence, typescripts and proofs in an attempt to reconstruct Joyce's creative process in order to come up with a more accurate text.

This edition uses the revised 1993 text of Gabler's version.

Reviews

Dirty, blasphemous and unreadable, or one of the greatest novels of the 20th century? No matter what your opinion of it, Ulysses has had a profound influence on modern fiction… Unforgettable - Guardian

Joyce I have loved ever since I first set eyes upon him. Ulysses is a magical work - Terry Wogan

Ulysses, with its comic-epic tapestry, took fiction deeper than ever into the raucous carnival of everyday life - Independent

Magnificent - John Banville

[The 1974 version] fixes 5,000 errors involving punctuation, omitted words, phrases, and even entire sentences’ - New York Times

The Odyssey, the Divine Comedy and Hamlet whisper their way through its pages: and Ulysses is their equal at every turn… - Simon Barnes The Times

[Gabler's edition is] a required object of study for every scholar working in English literature - Jerome McGann

The greatest novel of the century - Anthony Burgess Observer

Ulysses is a work of high genius - Independent, 1922

It is steeped and soaked in the rough life of Dublin city. It is, however, intensely alive, fundamentally Irish, full of Rabelaisian “humour” with a highly developed sense of time and a fantastic imaginative faculty - The Times