Ulysses (Modern Edition)

Previously published as Ulysses by James Joyce.

A unique edition:

• beautifully formatted with optimized, easy-to-read fonts;
• complete, unabridged, original version of the first 1922 edition;
• annotated, with James Joyce’s Amazing Chronicle by Dr. Joseph Collins;

A masterwork of modernist literature, Ulysses used the structure of the Homeric Odyssey as a contrast to the lives of the Dublin working class. The entire work takes place during Dublin's “dailiest day possible,” Thursday, 16 June 1904. The bleak lives of the Dublin working class formed a stark contrast to the heroic Odyssey, and Joyce's frank realism was too avant-garde for the cultural police of the day. From the first installment in 1918, censorship issues dogged Ulysses, eventually forcing a halt to its serialization in 1920. The first editors Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were convicted in New York of publishing obscenity. Ulysses was subsequently banned in the U.S. until 1933, but copies often trickled in clandestinely as its suppression and subsequent publicity assured a wider demand for what was originally a relatively obscure avant-garde text.

Versions of Ulysses would pass through numerous hands before the first edition of 1922. During this period, Joyce embroidered continuously on the Odyssean theme, with textual discrepancies increasing as he added to various circulating copies. Compounded by unauthorized cuts, bowdlerizations, and pirated versions, Ulysses' convoluted publication history eventually obscured the author's intent: no definitive version of the text exists. The textual complexities have fueled a vast amount of scholarship. Joyce joked that Ulysses should "give Universities something to work on well into the next century." With the 1992 copyright expiration, there has been yet another explosion in Joycean scholarship and controversy. Whatever its other effects, the censorship battle over Ulysses certainly played a significant role in establishing its literary status. Along with the appearance of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland in 1922, the publication of Ulysses signaled the peak year of modernism, and became the icon of a new literary era.