Published: 1 August 2008
ISBN: 9780099511199
Imprint: Vintage Classics
Format: Trade Paperback
Pages: 672
RRP: $14.99

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Ulysses

James Joyce

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The edited version of Ulysses that caused so much controversy on its first publication. This edition is the accepted reference text for James Joyce studies.

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.

Published: 1 August 2008
ISBN: 9780099511199
Imprint: Vintage Classics
Format: Trade Paperback
Pages: 672
RRP: $14.99

Categories:

Share…

About the author

James Joyce

The eldest of ten children, James Joyce was born in Dublin on the 2nd of February 1882. Despite his family being impoverished by his father's failings as a business man, Joyce was educated at the best Jesuit schools and later in 1898 at University College Dublin. His first published work was a review on Ibsen's play When We Awaken in the Fortnightly Review in 1900. Upon graduating, Joyce moved to Paris in pursuit of a medical career. Before long, he gave up attending lectures and devoted himself to literature. He returned to Dublin as a result of the fatal illness of his mother and shortly afterwards, in 1904, Joyce met Nora Barnacle who was later to become his wife. The young couple travelled to the continent and in 1905 settled in Trieste where they were to remain until 1915. Joyce's first book Chamber Music was published in 1907 as a book of poetry and Dubliners followed in 1914.

The Joyces had two children; Giorgio, born 1905 and Lucia in 1907. Lucia was to develop a disturbing mental illness which greatly affected the family and would remain a prominent factor for the rest of Jocye's life. During the First World War Joyce moved to Zurich where he remained until 1919 when he moved to Paris to work on what is widely understood as his greatest and most prodigious work, Ulysses. After being worked on for eight years, Ulysses was published in Paris in 1922 on Joyces Birthday. It could be true to say that in Ulysses, Joyce attempts to 'know' everything and to add to this 'knowledge' by creating his own language. Joyce's highly experimental and revolutionary work positioned him firmly as one of the key figures of modernism.

As spoken to Georges Borach, one of Joyce's students in Zurich, Joyce comments that 'there are indeed hardly more than a dozen themes in world literature. Then there is an enormous number of combinations of these themes.' He goes on to denounce all the thinkers of the last 200 years and to position Aristotle as the 'greatest thinker of all time.' Such statements are testimony to Joyce's determination in his quest for knowledge, to know what knowledge was and to challenge it. Joyce greatly admired authors such as Dante, D'Annunzio and Ibsen.

Joyce was greatly admired by many authors including Italo Svevo, author of Zeno's Conscience who he met in Trieste and, Samuel Beckett who he met in Paris.

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Praise for Ulysses

The greatest novel of the century
Anthony Burgess, Observer

Ulysses is a work of high genius
Independent, 1922

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

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

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

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

Magnificent
John Banville

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

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

If you manage to love this enormous novel set during one day in Dublin, it will change your life.
Katy Guest, The Independent

Ulysses changed the stakes of the novel for ever, letting us see how extraordinary the everyday can be by plugging us straight into the minds of its characters, and using language in an electrifying way that only poets had dared to up till then
New Statesman