James Joyce (1882 - 1941) was an Irish novelist, short story writer and poet, and one of the central figures of literary modernism. Writing almost entirely from continental exile about the city of Dublin, he produced Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, works that reshaped the possibilities of prose fiction. [1][2]
Early life and education
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, the eldest surviving child of a large family whose fortunes declined steadily through his childhood as his father lost employment and property. [1]
He was educated by the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College, and then at University College Dublin, where he read modern languages and published an early essay on Ibsen. He abandoned Catholic practice while retaining a deep knowledge of its liturgy and theology, which permeates his fiction. [2]
Exile
Joyce left Ireland for Paris in 1902, returning on his mother's death, and in 1904 met Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid from Galway. Their first outing together, on 16 June 1904, is the day on which Ulysses is set and is commemorated annually as Bloomsday. [3]
The couple left Ireland later that year and lived in Pola, Trieste, Rome and Zurich, largely on Joyce's earnings as a teacher of English at Berlitz schools and on the support of patrons, among them the editor Harriet Shaw Weaver. They had two children, Giorgio and Lucia, and married in 1931. [1]
Major work
The story collection Dubliners, completed in 1907, was delayed for years by printers and publishers wary of its frankness and appeared in 1914. It closes with The Dead, widely regarded as one of the finest stories in English. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, serialised from 1914, traces the formation of Stephen Dedalus in a prose that develops with its protagonist's consciousness. [2]
Ulysses was serialised in the American periodical The Little Review from 1918 and published in Paris in 1922 by Sylvia Beach of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Following Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom through a single Dublin day, it maps their movements onto the structure of Homer's Odyssey and shifts style radically between episodes, from interior monologue to parody and catechism. Obscenity rulings kept it out of the United States until a landmark judgment in 1933 and out of the United Kingdom until 1936. [4]
Joyce spent the following seventeen years on the work published in 1939 as Finnegans Wake, a cyclical night-book written in a dense invented idiom of portmanteau words drawn from dozens of languages. [1]
Later life and death
Joyce suffered from severe eye disease throughout his later years and underwent repeated operations, and he was preoccupied by the mental illness of his daughter Lucia. The outbreak of the Second World War forced the family from Paris to Zurich, where Joyce died on 13 January 1941 following surgery for a perforated ulcer. [2]
Legacy
Joyce's techniques of stream of consciousness, allusion and stylistic pastiche influenced writers across the twentieth century, and Ulysses is routinely placed at or near the head of lists of modern novels in English. Dublin, the city he left and never ceased to write about, is now organised in part around his work, with the Bloomsday celebrations drawing visitors each June. [3]
