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James Joyce

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Template:Short description Template:About Template:Featured article Template:Use British EnglishTemplate:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox writer

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (born James Augusta JoyceTemplate:Efn; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the twentieth century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.

Born in Dublin into a middle-class family, Joyce attended the Jesuit Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, then, briefly, the Christian Brothers–run O'Connell School. Despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father's unpredictable finances, he excelled at the Jesuit Belvedere College and graduated from University College Dublin in 1902. In 1904, he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, and they moved to mainland Europe. He briefly worked in Pola (now in Croatia) and then moved to Trieste in Austria-Hungary, working as an English instructor. Except for an eight-month stay in Rome working as a correspondence clerk and three visits to Dublin, Joyce lived there until 1915. In Trieste, he published his book of poems Chamber Music and his short story collection Dubliners, and began serially publishing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the English magazine The Egoist. During most of World War I, Joyce lived in Zurich, Switzerland, and worked on Ulysses. After the war, he briefly returned to Trieste and in 1920 moved to Paris, which was his primary residence until 1940.

Ulysses was first published in Paris in 1922, but its publication in the United Kingdom and the United States was prohibited because of its perceived obscenity. Copies were smuggled into both countries and pirated versions were printed up until the mid-1930s when publication became legal. Ulysses frequently ranks high in lists of the greatest books, and academic literature analysing Joyce's work is extensive and ongoing. Many writers, film-makers, and other artists have been influenced by his stylistic innovations, such as his meticulous attention to detail, use of interior monologue, wordplay, and the radical transformation of traditional plot and character development.

Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, his fictional universe centres on Dublin and is largely populated by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there. Ulysses is set in the streets and alleyways of the city. Joyce is quoted as saying, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."Template:Sfn

Joyce started his next major work, Finnegans Wake, in 1923, publishing it sixteen years later in 1939. Between these years, Joyce travelled widely. He and Nora were married in a civil ceremony in London in 1931. He made several trips to Switzerland, frequently seeking treatment for his increasingly severe eye problems and psychological help for his daughter, Lucia. When France was occupied by Germany during World War II, Joyce moved back to Zurich in 1940. He died there in 1941 after surgery for a perforated ulcer at age 58.

Early life

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James Joyce at six in 1888 in sailor suit with hands in pocket, facing the camera
Photograph of Joyce aged six, 1888

Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland,Template:Sfn to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane "May" (Template:Nee Murray). He was the eldest of ten surviving siblings. He was baptised as James Augustine JoyceTemplate:Efn according to the rites of the Roman Catholic Church in the nearby St Joseph's Church in Terenure on 5 February 1882 by Rev. John O'Mulloy.Template:Efn His godparents were Philip and Ellen McCann.Template:Sfnm The Joyce family came from Fermoy in County Cork, where they owned a small salt and lime works. Joyce's paternal grandfather, James Augustine, married Ellen O'Connell, daughter of John O'Connell, a Cork alderman who owned a drapery business and other properties in Cork City. Her family claimed kinship with the political leader Daniel O'Connell, who had helped secure Catholic emancipation for the Irish in 1829.Template:Sfn

John Stanislaus Joyce was appointed rate collector by Dublin Corporation in 1887. The family moved to the fashionable small town of Bray, Template:Convert from Dublin. Joyce was attacked by a dog around this time, leading to his lifelong fear of dogs.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn He later developed a fear of thunderstorms,Template:Sfnm from a superstitious aunt who had described them as a sign of God's wrath.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn

In 1891, nine-year-old Joyce wrote the poem "Et Tu, Healy" on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell that his father printed and distributed to friends.Template:Sfnm The poem expressed the sentiments of the elder Joyce,Template:Sfnm who was angry at Parnell's apparent betrayal by the Irish Catholic Church, the Irish Parliamentary Party, and the British Liberal Party that resulted in a collaborative failure to secure Irish Home Rule in the British Parliament.Template:Sfn This sense of betrayal, particularly by the Church, left a lasting impression that Joyce expressed in his life and art.Template:Sfn

That year, his family began to slide into poverty, worsened by his father's drinking and financial mismanagement.Template:Sfnm John Joyce's name was published in Stubbs' Gazette, a blacklist of debtors and bankrupts, in November 1891, and he was temporarily suspended from work.Template:Sfnm In January 1893, he was dismissed with a reduced pension.Template:Sfnm

Joyce began his education in 1888 at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane, County Kildare, but had to leave in 1891 when his father could no longer pay the fees.Template:Sfn He studied at home and briefly attended the Christian Brothers O'Connell School on North Richmond Street, Dublin. Joyce's father then had a chance meeting with the Jesuit priest John Conmee, who knew the family. Conmee arranged for Joyce and his brother Stanislaus to attend the Jesuits' Dublin school, Belvedere College, without fees starting in 1893.Template:Sfn In 1895, Joyce, now 13, was elected by his peers to join the Sodality of Our Lady.Template:Sfnm Joyce spent five years at Belvedere, his intellectual formation guided by the principles of Jesuit education laid down in the Ratio Studiorum (Plan of Studies).Template:Sfn He won first place for English composition in his final two yearsTemplate:Sfn before graduating in 1898.Template:Sfn

University years

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picture of the Newman House
Newman House, Dublin, which was University College in Joyce's timeTemplate:Sfn

Joyce enrolled at University CollegeTemplate:Efn in 1898 to study English, French and Italian.Template:Sfn While there, he was exposed to the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, which had a strong influence on his thought for the rest of his life.Template:Sfnm He participated in many of Dublin's theatrical and literary circles. His closest colleagues included leading Irish figures of his generation including George Clancy, Tom Kettle and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington.Template:Sfn Many of the acquaintances he made at this time appeared in his work.Template:Sfn His first publication—a laudatory review of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken—was printed in The Fortnightly Review in 1900. Inspired by Ibsen's works, Joyce sent him a fan letter in NorwegianTemplate:SfnmTemplate:Efn and wrote a play, A Brilliant Career,Template:Sfnm which he later destroyed.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn

In 1901 the National Census of Ireland listed Joyce as a 19-year-old Irish- and English-speaking unmarried student living with his parents, six sisters and three brothers at Royal Terrace (now Inverness Road) in Clontarf, Dublin.Template:Sfn During this year he became friends with Oliver St. John Gogarty,Template:Sfnm the model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses.Template:Sfn In November, Joyce wrote an article, The Day of the Rabblement, criticising the Irish Literary Theatre for its unwillingness to produce the works of playwrights like Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, and Gerhart Hauptmann.Template:Sfn He protested against nostalgic Irish populism and argued for an outward-looking, cosmopolitan literature.Template:Sfn Because he mentioned Gabriele D'Annunzio's novel Template:Lang (The Flame),Template:Sfn which was on the Roman Catholic list of prohibited books, his college magazine refused to print it. Joyce and Sheehy-Skeffington—who had also had an article rejected—had their essays jointly printed and distributed. Arthur Griffith decried the censorship of Joyce's work in his newspaper United Irishman.Template:Sfnm

Joyce graduated from the Royal University of Ireland in October 1902. He considered studying medicineTemplate:Sfn and began attending lectures at the Catholic University Medical School in Dublin.Template:Sfnm When the medical school refused to provide a tutoring position to help finance his education, he left Dublin to study medicine in Paris,Template:Sfnm where he received permission to attend the course for a certificate in physics, chemistry, and biology at the École de Médecine.Template:Sfn By the end of January 1903 he had given up plans to study medicine,Template:Sfnm but he stayed in Paris, often reading late in the Template:Lang.Template:Sfnm He frequently wrote home claiming ill health due to the water, the cold weather, and his change of diet,Template:Sfn appealing for money his family could ill afford.Template:Sfnm

Post-university years in Dublin

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Jame's Joyce's bust on St. Stephen's Green, Dublin. It says James Joyce 1882–1914.
Bust of Joyce on St Stephen's Green, Dublin, by Marjorie Fitzgibbon

In April 1903, Joyce learned his mother was dyingTemplate:Efn and immediately returned to Ireland.Template:Sfnm He would tend to her, reading aloud from drafts that were eventually worked into his unfinished novel Stephen Hero.Template:Sfnm During her final days, she unsuccessfully tried to get him to make his confession and to take communion.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn She died on 13 August.Template:Sfnm Afterwards, Joyce and Stanislaus refused to kneel with other members of the family praying at her bedside.Template:Sfnm John Joyce's drinking and abusiveness increased in the months following her death, and the family began to fall apart.Template:Sfnm Joyce spent much of his time carousing with Gogarty and his medical school colleagues,Template:Sfnm and tried to scrape together a living by reviewing books.Template:Sfnm

Joyce's life began to change when he met Nora Barnacle on 10 June 1904. She was a twenty-year-old woman from Galway city, who was working in Dublin as a chambermaid.Template:Sfnm They had their first outing together on 16 June 1904,Template:Efn walking through the Dublin suburb of Ringsend, where Nora masturbated him.Template:Sfnm This event was commemorated as the date for the action of Ulysses, known in popular culture as "Bloomsday" in honour of the novel's main character Leopold Bloom.Template:Sfn This began a relationship that continued for thirty-seven years until Joyce died.Template:Sfn Soon after this outing, Joyce, who had been out with his colleagues,Template:Sfnm approached a young woman in St Stephen's Green and was beaten up by her companion. He was picked up and dusted off by an acquaintance of his father's, Alfred H. Hunter, who took him into his home to tend to his injuries. Hunter, who was rumoured to be a Jew and to have an unfaithful wife, became one of the models for Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses.Template:Sfnm

Joyce was a talented tenor and explored becoming a musical performer.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn On 8 May 1904, he was a contestant in the Feis Ceoil,Template:Sfn an Irish music competition for promising composers, instrumentalists and singers.Template:Sfnm In the months before the contest, Joyce took singing lessons with two voice instructors, Benedetto Palmieri and Vincent O'Brien.Template:Sfn He paid the entry fee by pawning some of his books.Template:Sfn For the contest, Joyce had to sing three songs. He did well with the first two, but when he was told he had to sight read the third, he refused.Template:Sfnm Joyce won the third-place medal anyway.Template:Efn After the contest, Palmieri wrote to Joyce that Luigi Denza, the composer of the popular song "Template:Lang" who was the judge for the contest,Template:Sfn spoke highly of his voice and would have given him first place but for the sight-reading and lack of sufficient training.Template:Sfn Palmieri offered to give Joyce free singing lessons. Joyce refused the lessons, but kept singing in Dublin concerts that year.Template:Sfnm His performance at a concert given on 27 August may have solidified Nora's devotion to him.Template:Sfnm Although Joyce did not ultimately pursue a singing career, he would include thousands of musical allusions in his literary works.Template:Sfn

Throughout 1904, Joyce sought to develop his literary reputation. On 7 January he attempted to publish a prose work examining aesthetics called A Portrait of the Artist,Template:Sfn but it was rejected by the intellectual journal Dana. He then reworked it into a fictional novel of his youth that he called Stephen Hero that he laboured over for years but eventually abandoned.Template:Efn He wrote a satirical poem called "The Holy Office",Template:Sfn which parodied W. B. Yeats's poem "To Ireland in the Coming Times"Template:SfnTemplate:Efn and once more mocked the Irish Literary Revival.Template:Sfn It too was rejected for publication; this time for being "unholy".Template:Sfn He wrote the collection of poems Chamber Music at this time;Template:Sfnm which was also rejected.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn He did publish three poems, one in DanaTemplate:Sfn and two in The Speaker,Template:Sfn and George William RussellTemplate:Efn published three of Joyce's short stories in the Irish Homestead. These stories—"The Sisters", "Eveline", and "After the Race"—were the beginnings of Dubliners.Template:Sfnm

In September 1904, Joyce was having difficulties finding a place to live and moved into a Martello tower near Dublin, which Gogarty was renting.Template:Sfnm Within a week, Joyce left when Gogarty and another housemate, Dermot Chenevix Trench, fired a pistol in the middle of the night at some pans hanging directly over Joyce's bed.Template:Sfnm With the help of funds from Lady Gregory and a few other acquaintances, Joyce and Nora left Ireland less than a month later.Template:Sfnm

1904–1906: Zurich, Pola and Trieste

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Zurich and Pola

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In October 1904, Joyce and Nora went into self-imposed exile.Template:Sfnm They briefly stopped in London and Paris to secure fundsTemplate:Sfn before heading on to Zurich. Joyce had been informed through an agent in England that there was a vacancy at the Berlitz Language School, but when he arrived there was no position.Template:Sfn The couple stayed in Zurich for a little over a week.Template:Sfnm The director of the school sent Joyce on to Trieste,Template:Sfn which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the First World War.Template:Efn There was no vacancy there either.Template:Efn The director of the school in Trieste, Almidano Artifoni, secured a position for him in Pola, then Austria-Hungary's major naval base,Template:Efn where he mainly taught English to naval officers.Template:Sfnm Less than one month after the couple had left Ireland, Nora had become pregnant.Template:Sfn Joyce soon became close friends with Alessandro Francini Bruni, the director of the school at Pola,Template:Sfnm and his wife Clothilde. By the beginning of 1905, the two families were living together.Template:Sfnm Joyce kept writing when he could. He completed a short story for Dubliners, "Clay", and worked on his novel Stephen Hero.Template:Sfnm He disliked Pola, calling it a "back-of-God-speed place—a naval Siberia",Template:Sfn and as soon as a job became available, he went to Trieste.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn

'Stella Polare', a café on the corner of an intersection. Tables with umbrellas on one street.
The Caffè Stella Polare in Trieste was often visited by Joyce.Template:Sfn
File:Kip Jamesa Joycea u Trstu.jpg
A statue of Joyce in Trieste

First stay in Trieste

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Joyce moved to Trieste in March 1905 aged 23. He taught English at the Berlitz school.Template:Sfn That June he published the satirical poem "Holy Office".Template:Sfnm After Nora gave birth to their first child, Giorgio,Template:Efn on 27 July 1905,Template:Sfnm he convinced Stanislaus to move to Trieste and obtained a position for him at the Berlitz school. Stanislaus moved in with Joyce as soon as he arrived that October, although most of his salary went directly to supporting Joyce's family.Template:Sfnm In February 1906, the Joyce household once more shared an apartment with the Francini Brunis.Template:Sfnm

During this period Joyce completed 24 chapters of Stephen HeroTemplate:Sfn and all but the final story of Dubliners,Template:Sfn but was unable to get Dubliners published. Although the London publisher Grant Richards had a contract with Joyce, the printers were unwilling to print passages they found controversial; English law could not protect them if brought to court for circulating indecent language.Template:Sfnm Richards and Joyce tried to find a solution where the book could avoid legal liability while preserving Joyce's artistic integrity. As they negotiated, Richards began to scrutinise the stories more carefully. He became concerned that the book might damage his publishing house's reputation and eventually backed down from his agreement.Template:Sfn

Trieste was Joyce's main residence until 1920;Template:Sfn he stayed temporarily in Rome, travelled to Dublin, and emigrated to Zurich during World War I, but Trieste became a second Dublin for himTemplate:Sfn and played an important role in his development as a writer.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn He completed Dubliners, reworked Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, wrote his only published play Exiles and decided to make Ulysses a full-length novel as he worked through his notes and jottings,Template:Sfn working out the characters of Leopold and Molly Bloom in Trieste.Template:Sfn Many of the novel's details were taken from Joyce's observation of the city and its people,Template:Sfn and some of its stylistic innovations appear to have been influenced by Futurism.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn There are even words of the Triestine dialect in Finnegans Wake.Template:Sfnm Joyce was introduced to the Greek Orthodox liturgy in Trieste. Under its influence, he rewrote his first short story and later drew on it in creating the liturgical parodies in Ulysses.Template:Sfnm

1906–1915: Rome, Trieste, and sojourns to Dublin

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Rome

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File:Roma - Campo de' Fiori.jpg
Monument to Giordano Bruno at the Campo de' Fiori by Ettore Ferrari. Joyce admired BrunoTemplate:Sfn and attended the procession in his honour while in Rome.Template:Sfn

In late May 1906, the head of the Berlitz school ran away after embezzling its funds. Artifoni took over the school but let Joyce know that he could only afford to keep one brother on.Template:Sfnm Tired of Trieste and discouraged that he could not get a publisher for Dubliners, Joyce found an advertisement for a correspondence clerk in a Roman bank that paid twice his current salary.Template:Sfn He was hired for the position and went to Rome at the end of July.Template:Sfn

Joyce felt he accomplished very little during his brief stay in Rome,Template:Sfn but it had a large impact on his writing.Template:Sfn Though his new job took up most of his time, he revised Dubliners and worked on Stephen Hero.Template:Sfn Rome was the birthplace of the idea for "The Dead", which would become the final story of Dubliners,Template:Sfnm and for Ulysses,Template:Sfnm which was originally conceived as a short story.Template:Efn His stay in the city was one of his inspirations for Exiles.Template:Sfnm While there, he read the socialist historian Guglielmo Ferrero in depth.Template:Sfn Ferrero's anti-heroic interpretations of history, arguments against militarism, and conflicted attitudes toward JewsTemplate:Sfn would find their way into Ulysses, particularly in the character of Leopold Bloom.Template:Sfnm In London, Elkin Mathews published Chamber Music on the recommendation of the British poet Arthur Symons.Template:Sfnm Nonetheless, Joyce was dissatisfied with his job, had exhausted his finances, and realised he would need additional support when he learned Nora was pregnant again.Template:Sfn He left Rome after only seven months.Template:Sfn

Second stay in Trieste

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Photograph of Trieste filled with ships around 1907 viewing the city from out in the harbor
Trieste, ca. 1907

Joyce returned to Trieste in March 1907, but was unable to find full-time work. He went back to being an English instructor, working part-time for Berlitz and giving private lessons.Template:Sfn The author Ettore Schmitz, better known by pen name Italo Svevo, was one of his students. Svevo was a Catholic of Jewish origin who became one of the models for Leopold Bloom.Template:Sfn Joyce learned much of what he knew about Judaism from him.Template:Sfnm The two became lasting friends and mutual critics.Template:Sfnm Svevo supported Joyce's identity as an author, helping him work through his writer's block with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.Template:Sfnm Roberto Prezioso, editor of the Italian newspaper Piccolo della Sera, was another of Joyce's students. He helped Joyce financially by commissioning him to write for the newspaper. Joyce quickly produced three articles aimed toward the Italian irredentists in Trieste. He indirectly paralleled their desire for independence from Austria-Hungary with the struggle against British rule in Ireland.Template:Sfnm Joyce earned additional money by giving a series of lectures at Trieste's Università Popolare on Ireland and the arts,Template:Sfnm as well as on William Shakespeare's play Hamlet.Template:Sfn

In May, Joyce was struck by an attack of rheumatic fever,Template:Sfnm which left him incapacitated for weeks.Template:Efn The illness exacerbated eye problems that plagued him for the rest of his life.Template:Sfnm While Joyce was still recovering from the attack, Lucia was born on 26 July 1907.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn During his convalescence, he was able to finish "The Dead", the last story of Dubliners.Template:Sfn

Although a heavy drinker,Template:Sfn Joyce gave up alcohol for a period in 1908.Template:Sfnm He reworked Stephen Hero as the more concise and interior A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He completed the third chapter by AprilTemplate:Sfn and translated John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea into Italian with the help of Nicolò Vidacovich.Template:Sfn He even took singing lessons again.Template:Sfnm Joyce had been looking for an English publisher for Dubliners but was unable to find one, so he submitted it to a Dublin publisher, Maunsel and Company, owned by George Roberts.Template:Sfn

Visits to Dublin

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Dublin in 1909, with trams, horsecarts, and pedestrians
Dublin in 1909

In July 1909, Joyce received a year's advance payment from one of his students and returned to Ireland to introduce Giorgio to both sides of the family, his own in Dublin and Nora's in Galway.Template:Sfn He unsuccessfully applied for the position of Chair of Italian at his alma mater, which had become University College Dublin.Template:Sfn He met with Roberts, who seemed positive about publishing Dubliners.Template:Sfn He returned to Trieste in September with his sister Eva, who helped Nora run the home.Template:Sfn Joyce only stayed in Trieste for a month, as he almost immediately came upon the idea of starting a cinema in Dublin, which unlike Trieste had none. He quickly got the backing of some Triestine businessmen and returned to Dublin in October, launching Ireland's first cinema, the Volta Cinematograph.Template:Sfn It was initially well-received, but fell apart after Joyce left.Template:Sfn He returned to Trieste in January 1910 with another sister, Eileen.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn

From 1910 to 1912, Joyce still lacked a reliable income. This brought his conflicts with Stanislaus, who was frustrated with lending him money, to their peak.Template:Sfn In 1912, Prezioso arranged for him to lecture on Hamlet for the Minerva Society between November 1912 and February 1913.Template:Sfn Joyce once more lectured at the Università Popolare on various topics in English literature and applied for a teaching diploma in English at the University of Padua.Template:Sfn He performed very well on the qualification tests, but was denied because Italy did not recognise his degree from an Irish university. In mid-1912, Joyce and his family returned to Dublin briefly.Template:Sfn While there, his three-year-long struggle with Roberts over the publication of DublinersTemplate:Sfn came to an end as Roberts refused to publish the book due to concerns of libel. Roberts had the printed sheets destroyed, though Joyce was able to obtain a copy of the proof sheets.Template:Efn When Joyce returned to Trieste, he wrote an invective against Roberts, "Gas from a Burner".Template:Sfn He never went to Dublin again.Template:Sfn

Publication of Dubliners and A Portrait

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Joyce's fortunes changed for the better in 1913 when Richards agreed to publish Dubliners. It was issued on 15 June 1914,Template:Sfn eight and a half years since Joyce had first submitted it to him.Template:Sfn Around the same time, he found an unexpected advocate in Ezra Pound, who was living in London.Template:Efn On the advice of Yeats,Template:Sfn Pound wrote to Joyce asking if he could include a poem from Chamber Music, "I Hear an Army Charging upon the Land" in the journal Des Imagistes. They struck up a correspondence that lasted until the late 1930s. Pound became Joyce's promoter, helping ensure that Joyce's works were published and publicised.Template:Sfnm

After Pound persuaded Dora Marsden to serially publish A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the London literary magazine The Egoist,Template:Sfn Joyce's pace of writing increased. He completed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by 1914;Template:Sfn resumed Exiles, completing it in 1915;Template:Sfn started the novelette Giacomo Joyce, which he eventually abandoned;Template:Sfnm and began drafting Ulysses.Template:Sfnm

In August 1914, World War I broke out. Although Joyce and Stanislaus were subjects of the United Kingdom, which was now at war with Austria-Hungary, they remained in Trieste. Even when Stanislaus, who had publicly expressed his sympathy for the Triestine irredentists, was interned at the beginning of January 1915, Joyce chose to stay. In May 1915, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary,Template:Sfn and less than a month later Joyce took his family to Zurich in neutral Switzerland.Template:Sfnm

1915–1920: Zurich and Trieste

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Zurich

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File:Zurich, Switzerland (26459893447).jpg
Zurich, Switzerland, where Joyce lived from 1915 to 1919

Joyce arrived in Zurich as a double exile: he was an Irishman with a British passport and a Triestine on parole from Austria-Hungary.Template:Sfn To get to Switzerland, he had to promise the Austro-Hungarian officials that he would not help the Allies during the war, and he and his family had to leave almost all of their possessions in Trieste.Template:Sfnm During the war, he was kept under surveillance by both the British and Austro-Hungarian secret services.Template:Sfn

Joyce's first concern was earning a living. One of Nora's relatives sent them a small sum to cover the first few months. Pound and Yeats worked with the British government to provide a stipend from the Royal Literary Fund in 1915 and a grant from the British civil list the following year.Template:Sfnm Eventually, Joyce received large regular sums from the editor Harriet Shaw Weaver, who operated The Egoist, and the psychotherapist Edith Rockefeller McCormick, who lived in Zurich studying under Carl Jung.Template:Sfnm Weaver financially supported Joyce for the rest of his life and even paid for his funeral.Template:Sfn Between 1917 and the beginning of 1919, Joyce was financially secure and lived quite well;Template:Sfn the family sometimes stayed in Locarno in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland.Template:Sfn However, health problems remained a constant issue. During their time in Zurich, both Joyce and Nora suffered illnesses that were diagnosed as "nervous breakdowns"Template:Sfnm and he had to undergo many eye surgeries.Template:Sfnm

Writing Ulysses

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During the war, Zurich was the centre of a vibrant expatriate community. Joyce's spent evenings in the Cafe Pfauen,Template:Sfnm where he got to know some of the artists living in the city, including the sculptor August SuterTemplate:Sfn and the painter Frank Budgen.Template:Sfnm He often used the time spent with them as material for Ulysses.Template:Sfn He met the writer Stefan Zweig,Template:Sfnm who organised the premiere of Exiles in Munich in August 1919.Template:Sfn He became aware of Dada, which was coming into its own at the Cabaret Voltaire.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn He may have met the Marxist theoretician and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin at the Cafe Odeon,Template:Sfnm a place they both frequented.Template:Sfn

Joyce kept up his interest in music. He met Ferruccio Busoni,Template:Sfnm staged music with Otto Luening, and learned music theory from Philipp Jarnach.Template:Sfn Much of what Joyce learned about musical notation and counterpoint found its way into Ulysses, particularly the "Sirens" section.Template:Sfnm

Joyce avoided public discussion of the war and maintained strict neutrality.Template:Sfnm He made few comments about the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland; although he was sympathetic to the Irish independence movement,Template:Sfnm he disagreed with its violence.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn He stayed intently focused on UlyssesTemplate:Sfn and the struggle to get his work published. Some of the serial instalments of "The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" in The Egoist had been censored by the printers, but the entire novel was published by B. W. Huebsch in 1916.Template:Sfn In 1918, Pound got a commitment from Margaret Caroline Anderson, the owner and editor of the New York-based literary magazine The Little Review, to publish Ulysses serially.Template:Sfnm

The English Players

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The Pfauen complex, a large stone building. Theatre is in the centre. Cafe used to be right of theatre
The Pfauen in Zurich. Joyce's preferred hangout was the café, which used to be on the right corner. The theatre staged the English Players.Template:Sfn

Joyce co-founded an acting company, the English Players, and became its business manager. The company was pitched to the British government as a contribution to the war effort,Template:Sfn and mainly staged works by Irish playwrights, such as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and John Millington Synge.Template:Sfn For Synge's Riders to the Sea, Nora played a principal role and Joyce sang offstage,Template:Sfn which he did again when Robert Browning's In a Balcony was staged. He hoped the company would eventually stage his play, Exiles,Template:Sfnm but his participation in the English Players declined in the wake of the influenza epidemic of 1918, though the company continued until 1920.Template:Sfn

Joyce's work with the English Players involved him in a lawsuit. Henry Wilfred Carr, a wounded war veteran and British consul, accused Joyce of underpaying him for his role in The Importance of Being Earnest. Carr sued for compensation; Joyce countersued for libel. The cases were resolved in 1919, with Joyce winning the compensation case but losing the one for libel.Template:Sfnm The incident ended up creating acrimony between the British consulate and Joyce for the rest of his time in Zurich.Template:Sfnm

Third stay in Trieste

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By 1919, Joyce was in financial difficulty again. McCormick stopped paying her stipend, partly because he refused to submit to psychoanalysis from Jung,Template:Sfnm and Zurich had become expensive to live in after the war. He was also becoming isolated as the city's emigres returned home. In October 1919, Joyce's family moved back to Trieste, but it had changed. The Austro-Hungarian empire had ceased to exist, and Trieste was now an Italian city in post-war recovery.Template:Sfn Eight months after his return, Joyce went to Sirmione, Italy, to meet Pound, who made arrangements for him to move to Paris.Template:Sfnm Joyce and his family packed their belongings and headed for Paris in June 1920.Template:Sfn

1920–1941: Paris and Zurich

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Paris

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Picture of James Joyce from 1922 in three-quarters view looking downward
Joyce in a September 1922 issue of Shadowland, photographed by Man Ray

When Joyce and his family arrived in Paris in July 1920, their visit was intended to be a layover on their way to London.Template:Sfnm For the first four months, he stayed with Template:IllTemplate:Sfn and met Sylvia Beach, who ran the Rive Gauche bookshop, Shakespeare and Company.Template:Sfnm Beach quickly became an important person in Joyce's life, providing financial support,Template:Sfn and becoming one of his publishers.Template:Sfn Through Beach and Pound, Joyce quickly joined the intellectual circle of Paris and was integrated into the international modernist artist community.Template:Sfnm Joyce met Valery Larbaud, who championed Joyce's works to the FrenchTemplate:Sfn and supervised the French translation of Ulysses.Template:Sfnm Paris became the Joyces' regular residence for twenty years, though they never settled into a single location for long.Template:Sfnm

Publication of Ulysses

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Joyce finished writing Ulysses near the end of 1921, but had difficulties getting it published. With financial backing from the lawyer John Quinn,Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Margaret Anderson and her co-editor Jane Heap had begun serially publishing it in The Little Review in March 1918Template:Sfn but in January and May 1919, two instalments were suppressed as obscene and potentially subversive.Template:Sfnm In September 1920, an unsolicited instalment of the "Nausicaa" episode was sent to the daughter of a New York attorney associated with the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, leading to an official complaint.Template:Sfn The trial proceedings continued until February 1921, when Anderson and Healy, defended by Quinn, were fined $50 each for publishing obscenityTemplate:Sfn and ordered to cease publishing Ulysses.Template:Sfn Huebsch, who had expressed interest in publishing the novel in the United States, decided against it after the trial.Template:Sfnm Weaver was unable to find an English printer,Template:Sfnm and the novel was banned for obscenity in the United Kingdom in 1922, where it was blacklisted until 1936.Template:Sfn

Page saying 'ULYSSES by JAMES JOYCE will be published in the Autumn of 1921 by "SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY" – SYLVIA BEACH – 8, RUE DUPUYTREN, PARIS – VIe' with drawing of Shakespeare holding a book
Announcement of the initial publication of Ulysses

Almost immediately after Anderson and Healy were ordered to stop printing Ulysses, Beach agreed to publish it through her bookshop.Template:Sfnm She had books mailed to people in Paris and the United States who had subscribed to get a copy; Weaver sent books from Beach's plates to subscribers in England.Template:Sfnm Soon, the postal officials of both countries began confiscating the books.Template:Sfnm They were then smuggled into both countries.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Because the work had no copyright in the United States at this time, "bootleg" versions appeared, including pirate versions from publisher Samuel Roth, who only ceased his actions in 1928 when a court enjoined publication.Template:Sfn Ulysses was not legally published in the United States until 1934 after Judge John M. Woolsey ruled in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses that the book was not obscene.Template:Sfn

Writing Finnegans Wake

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In 1923, Joyce began his next work, an experimental novel that eventually became Finnegans Wake.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn It would take sixteen years to complete.Template:Sfnm At first, Joyce called it Work in Progress, which was the name Ford Madox Ford used in April 1924 when he published its "Mamalujo" episode in his magazine, The Transatlantic Review. In 1926, Eugene and Maria Jolas serialised the novel in their magazine, transition. When parts of the novel first came out, some of Joyce's supporters—like Stanislaus, Pound, and Weaver—Template:Sfnm wrote negatively about it,Template:Sfnm and it was criticised by writers like Seán Ó Faoláin, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West.Template:Sfn In response, Joyce and the Jolases organised the publication of a collection of positive essays titled Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, which included writings by Samuel Beckett and William Carlos Williams.Template:Sfnm An additional purpose of publishing these essays was to market Work in Progress to a larger audience.Template:Sfn Joyce publicly revealed the novel's title as Finnegans Wake in 1939,Template:Sfn the same year he completed it. It was published in London by Faber and FaberTemplate:Sfn with the assistance of T. S. Eliot.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn

Joyce's health problems afflicted him throughout his Paris years. He had over a dozen eye operations,Template:Sfnm but his vision severely declined.Template:Sfn By 1930, he was practically blind in the left eye and his right eye functioned poorly.Template:Sfn He had all of his teeth removed because of infection.Template:Sfnm At one point, Joyce became worried that he could not finish Finnegans Wake, asking the Irish author James Stephens to complete it if he became unable.Template:Sfnm

Joyce's financial problems continued. Although he was now earning a good income from his investments and royalties, his spending habits often left him without available money.Template:Sfnm Despite these issues, he published Pomes Penyeach in 1927, a collection of thirteen poems that he wrote in Trieste, Zurich and Paris.Template:Sfn

Marriage in London

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File:43. Adolf Hoffmeister, James Joyce, 1966.jpg
1966 drawing of Joyce by Adolf Hoffmeister

In 1930, Joyce began thinking of establishing a residence in London once more,Template:Sfnm primarily to ensure that Giorgio, who had just married Helen Fleischmann, would have his inheritance secured under British law.Template:Sfnm Joyce moved to London, obtained a long-term lease on a flat, registered on the electoral roll, and became liable for jury service. After living together for twenty-seven years, Joyce and Nora got married at the Register Office in Kensington on 4 July 1931.Template:Sfnm Joyce stayed in London for at least six months to establish his residency, but abandoned his flat and returned to Paris later in the year when Lucia showed signs of mental illness. He planned to return, but never did and later became disaffected with England.Template:Sfnm

In later years, Joyce lived in Paris but frequently travelled to Switzerland for eye surgeryTemplate:Efn or for treatment for Lucia,Template:Sfn who was diagnosed with schizophrenia.Template:Sfn Lucia was analysed by Carl Jung, who had previously written that Ulysses was similar to schizophrenic writing.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn Jung suggested that she and her father were two people going into a river, except that Joyce was diving and Lucia was falling.Template:Sfn In spite of Joyce's attempts to help Lucia, she remained permanently institutionalised after his death.Template:Sfnm

Final return to Zurich

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In the late 1930s, Joyce became increasingly concerned about the rise of fascism and antisemitism.Template:Sfn In 1938, Joyce was involved in helping Jews escape Nazi persecution.Template:Sfnm After the fall of France in 1940, Joyce and his family fled from Nazi occupation, returning to Zurich a final time.Template:Sfn

Death

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Horizontal gravestone saying "JAMES JOYCE", "NORA BARNACLE JOYCE", GEORGE JOYCE", and "...ASTA OSTERWALDER JO...", all with dates. Behind the stone is a green hedge and a seated statue of Joyce holding a book and pondering.
Grave of Joyce and his family in Zurich-Fluntern; sculpture by Milton Hebald

On 11 January 1941, Joyce underwent surgery in Zurich for a perforated duodenal ulcer. He fell into a coma the following day. He awoke at 2 am on 13 January 1941, and asked a nurse to call his wife and son. They were en route when he died 15 minutes later, at age 58.Template:Sfn

His body was buried in the Fluntern Cemetery in Zurich. Swiss tenor Max Meili sang "Addio terra, addio cielo" from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo at the burial service.Template:Sfn Joyce had been a subject of the United Kingdom all of his life, and although two senior Irish diplomats were in Switzerland at the time, only the British consul attended the funeral. When Joseph Walshe, secretary at the Department of External Affairs in Dublin, was informed of Joyce's death by Frank Cremins, chargé d'affaires at Bern, Walshe responded, "Please wire details of Joyce's death. If possible find out did he die a Catholic? Express sympathy with Mrs Joyce and explain inability to attend funeral."Template:Sfn Buried originally in an ordinary grave, Joyce was moved in 1966 to a more prominent "honour grave", with a seated portrait statue by American artist Milton Hebald nearby. Nora, whom he had married in 1931, survived him by 10 years. She is buried by his side, as is their son Giorgio, who died in 1976.Template:Sfn

After Joyce's death, the Irish government declined Nora's request to permit the repatriation of Joyce's remains,Template:Sfn despite being persistently lobbied by the American diplomat John J. Slocum.Template:Sfn In October 2019, a motion was put to Dublin City Council to plan and budget for the costs of the exhumations and reburials of Joyce and his family somewhere in Dublin, subject to his family's wishes.Template:Sfn The proposal immediately became controversial, with the Irish Times commenting: "Template:Nbsp... it is hard not to suspect that there is a calculating, even mercantile, aspect to contemporary Ireland's relationship to its great writers, whom we are often more keen to 'celebrate', and if possible monetise, than read".Template:Sfn

Political views

[edit]
seated portrait of James Joyce in a suit. He is in three-quarters view looking left, wearing a suit. Table with books is in background on the right.
1934 portrait of Joyce, by Jacques-Émile Blanche

Throughout his life, Joyce maintained an active interest in Irish politicsTemplate:Sfnm and the country's relationship to the British Empire.Template:Sfnm He studied both socialismTemplate:Sfnm and anarchism.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn He attended socialist meetings and expressed an individualist anarchist view influenced by Benjamin Tucker's philosophy and Oscar Wilde's essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism".Template:Sfn He described his opinions as "those of a socialist artist".Template:Sfn Joyce's direct engagement in politics was strongest during his time in Trieste, when he submitted newspaper articles, gave lectures, and wrote letters advocating for Ireland's independence from British rule.Template:Sfnm After leaving Trieste, Joyce's direct involvement in politics waned,Template:Sfnm but his later works still reflect his commitment.Template:Sfnm He remained sympathetic to individualist anarchism and critical of coercive ideologies such as nationalism.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn His novels address socialist, anarchist, and Irish nationalist issues.Template:Sfn Ulysses has been read as a novel critiquing the effect of British rule on the Irish people.Template:Sfnm Finnegans Wake has been read as a work that investigates the divisive issues of Irish politics,Template:Sfnm the interrelationship between colonialism and race,Template:Sfnm and the coercive oppression of nationalism and fascism.Template:Sfn

Joyce wrote negatively of British rule in Ireland and was sympathetic towards attempts to establish an independent Irish republic.Template:Sfn In 1907, he expressed his support for the early Sinn Féin movement before the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922.Template:Sfnm However, throughout his life, Joyce refused to exchange his British passport for an Irish one.Template:Sfn When he had a choice, he renewed his British passport in 1935 instead of obtaining one from the Irish Free State,Template:SfnTemplate:Efn and chose to keep it in 1940 when accepting an Irish passport could have helped him to leave Vichy France more easily.Template:Sfnm His refusal to change his passport was partly due to the advantages that a British passport gave him internationally,Template:Sfnm his being out of sympathy with the violence of Irish politics,Template:Sfnm and his dismay over the Irish Free State's political alignment with the Catholic Church.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn

Religious views

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Picture showing the iconostasis of the Church of San Nicolò flanked by candles.
The interior of the Greek Orthodox Church of San Nicolò in Trieste, where Joyce occasionally attended servicesTemplate:Sfn

Joyce had a complex relationship with religion.Template:Sfn Firsthand statements by himTemplate:Efn and StanislausTemplate:Efn attest that he did not consider himself a Catholic, though his work is deeply influenced by Catholicism.Template:Sfn In particular, his intellectual foundations were grounded in his early Jesuitical education.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn Even after he left Ireland, he sometimes went to church. When living in Trieste, he woke up early to attend Catholic Mass on Holy Thursday and Good FridayTemplate:SfnmTemplate:Efn or occasionally attended Eastern Orthodox services, stating that he liked the ceremonies better.Template:Sfn

Joyce lapsed from the Church early in life,Template:Sfnm and Nora refused to allow a Catholic service when he died.Template:Efn His works frequently critique, ridicule, and blaspheme Catholicism,Template:Sfnm and he appropriates Catholic rituals and concepts for his own artistic purposes.Template:Sfnm As such, some critics have argued that Joyce firmly rejected the Catholic faith.Template:Sfnm However, Catholic critics have argued that Joyce never fully abandoned his faith,Template:Sfnm wrestling with it in his writings and becoming increasingly reconciled with it.Template:Sfnm They regard Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as expressions of a Catholic sensibility,Template:Sfn insisting that the critical views of religion expressed by the characters in his novels do not represent those of Joyce the author.Template:Sfn

Other critics have suggested that Joyce's apparent apostasy was less a denial of faith than a transmutation,Template:Sfnm a criticism of the Church's adverse impact on spiritual life, politics, and personal development.Template:Sfnm His attitude toward Catholicism has been described as an enigma in which there are two Joyces: a modern one who resisted the power of Catholicism and another who maintained his allegiance to its traditions.Template:Sfnm He has been compared to the medieval Template:Lang (wandering bishops), who left their discipline but not their cultural heritage of thought.Template:Sfn

Joyce's responses to questions about his faith were often ambiguous. For example, during an interview after the completion of Ulysses, Joyce was asked, "When did you leave the Catholic Church?" He answered, "That's for the Church to say."Template:Sfn

Major works

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Dubliners

[edit]

Template:Main

Title page saying 'DUBLINERS BY JAMES JOYCE', then a colophon, then 'LONDON / GRANT RICHARDS LTD. / PUBLISHERS'.
First edition of Dubliners; published by Grant Richards in London, 1914

Dubliners, first published in 1914, is a collection of 15 short storiesTemplate:Sfn that form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle-class life in and around the city in the early 20th century. The tales were written when Irish nationalism and the search for national identity was at its peak. Joyce holds up a mirror to that identity as a first step in the spiritual liberation of Ireland.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn The stories centre on Joyce's idea of an epiphany: a moment when a character experiences a life-changing self-understanding or illumination. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appear in minor roles in Joyce's novel Ulysses.Template:Sfn The initial stories are narrated by child protagonists. Later stories deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. This aligns with Joyce's tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence, and maturity.Template:Sfnm

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

[edit]

Template:Main A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, is a shortened rewrite of the novel Stephen Hero, which was abandoned in 1905. It is a Künstlerroman, a kind of coming-of-age novel depicting the childhood and adolescence of the protagonist Stephen Dedalus and his gradual growth into artistic self-consciousness.Template:Sfn It functions both as an autobiographical fiction of the author and a biography of the fictional protagonist.Template:Sfn Some hints of the techniques Joyce frequently employed in later works, such as stream of consciousness, interior monologue, and references to a character's psychic reality rather than to his external surroundings, are evident in this novel.Template:Sfn

Exiles and poetry

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Template:Main

Despite early interest in the theatre, Joyce published only one play, Exiles, begun shortly after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and published in 1918. A study of a husband-and-wife relationship, the play looks back to "The Dead" (the final story in Dubliners) and forward to Ulysses, which Joyce began around the time of the play's composition.Template:Sfn

He published three books of poetry.Template:Sfn The first full-length collection was Chamber Music (1907), which consisted of 36 short lyrics. It led to his inclusion in the Imagist Anthology, edited by Ezra Pound, a champion of Joyce's work. Other poetry Joyce published in his lifetime includes "Gas from a Burner" (1912), Pomes Penyeach (1927), and "Ecce Puer" (written in 1932 to mark the birth of his grandson and the recent death of his father). These were published by the Black Sun Press in Collected Poems (1936).Template:Sfn

Ulysses

[edit]

Template:Main

alt=Worn out blue book cover saying 'Ulysses', at top and 'by James Joyce' at the bottom
First edition of Ulysses; published by Shakespeare & Company in Paris, 1922

The action of Ulysses starts on 16 June 1904 at 8Template:Nbspam and ends sometime after 2Template:Nbspam the following morning. Much of it occurs inside the minds of the characters, who are portrayed through techniques such as interior monologue, dialogue, and soliloquy. The novel consists of 18 episodes, each covering roughly one hour of the day using a unique literary style.Template:Sfn Joyce structured each chapter to refer to an individual episode in Homer's Odyssey, as well as a specific colour, a particular art or science, and a bodily organ.Template:Efn Ulysses sets the characters and incidents of the Odyssey in 1904 Dublin, representing Odysseus (Ulysses), Penelope, and Telemachus in the characters of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus. It uses humour–Template:Sfn including parody, satire and comedy– to contrast the novel's characters with their Homeric models. Joyce played down the mythic correspondences by eliminating the chapter titlesTemplate:Sfnm so the work could be read independently of its Homeric structure.Template:Sfnm

Ulysses can be read as a study of Dublin in 1904, exploring various aspects of the city's life, dwelling on its squalor and monotony. Joyce claimed that if Dublin was destroyed in some catastrophe, it could be rebuilt using his work as a model.Template:Sfn To achieve this sense of detail, he relied on his memory, what he heard other people remember, and his readings, to create a sense of fastidious detail.Template:Sfn Joyce regularly used the 1904 edition of Thom's Directory—a work that listed the owners and tenants of every residential and commercial property in the city—to ensure his descriptions were accurate.Template:Sfn This combination of kaleidoscopic writing, reliance on a formal schema to structure the narrative, and exquisite attention to detail represents one of the book's major contributions to the development of 20th-century modernist literature.Template:Sfn

Finnegans Wake

[edit]

Template:Main

Finnegans Wake is an experimental novel that pushes stream of consciousnessTemplate:Sfnm and literary allusionTemplate:Sfn to their extremes. Although the work can be read from beginning to end, Joyce's writing transforms traditional ideas of plot and character development through his wordplay, allowing the book to be read nonlinearly. Much of the wordplay stems from the work being written in peculiar and obscure English, based mainly on complex multilevel puns. This approach is similar to, but far more extensive than, that used by Lewis Carroll in JabberwockyTemplate:Sfn and draws on a wide range of languages.Template:Sfn The associative nature of its language has led to it being interpreted as the story of a dream.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn

The metaphysics of Giordano Bruno of Nola, whom Joyce had read in his youth,Template:Sfnm plays an important role in Finnegans Wake, as it provides the framework for how the identities of the characters interplay and are transformed.Template:Sfnm Giambattista Vico's cyclical view of history—in which civilisation rises from chaos, passes through theocratic, aristocratic, and democratic phases, and then lapses back into chaos—structures the text's narrative,Template:Sfnm as evidenced by the opening and closing words of the book: Finnegans Wake opens with the words "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs"Template:Sfn and ends "A way a lone a last a loved a long the".Template:Sfn In other words, the book ends with the beginning of a sentence and begins with the end of the same sentence, turning the narrative into one great cycle.Template:Sfn

Legacy

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Bronze statue of Joyce standing in a coat and broadbrimmed hat: His head is cocked looking up, his left leg is crossed over his right, his right hand holds a cane, and his left is in his trouser pocket, with the left part of his coat tucked back.
Statue of Joyce on North Earl Street, Dublin, by Marjorie Fitzgibbon

Joyce's work still has a profound influence on contemporary culture.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Ulysses is a model for fiction writers, particularly its explorations into the power of language.Template:Sfn Its emphasis on the details of everyday life has opened up new possibilities of expression for authors, painters and film-makers.Template:Sfn It retains its prestige among readers, often ranking high on 'Great Book' lists.Template:Sfn Joyce's innovations extend beyond English literature: his writing has been an inspiration for Latin American writers,Template:Sfn and Finnegans Wake has become one of the key texts for French post-structuralism.Template:Sfnm

The open-ended form of Joyce's novels keeps them open to constant reinterpretation.Template:Sfn They inspire an increasingly global community of literary critics. Joyce's studies—based on a relatively small canon of three novels, a small short story collection, one play, and two small books of poems—have generated over 15,000 articles, monographs, theses, translations, and editions.Template:Sfn

In popular culture, the work and life of Joyce is celebrated annually on 16 June, known as Bloomsday, in Dublin and in an increasing number of cities worldwide.Template:Sfn

Collections, museums, and study centres

[edit]

The National Library of Ireland holds a large collection of Joycean material including manuscripts and notebooks, much of it available online.Template:Sfn A joint venture between the library and University College Dublin, the Museum of Literature Ireland,Template:Sfn the majority of whose exhibits are about Joyce and his work, has both a small permanent Joyce-related collection, and borrows from its parent institutions; its displays include "Copy No. 1" of Ulysses.Template:Sfn Dedicated centres in Dublin include the James Joyce Centre in North Great George's Street, the James Joyce Tower and Museum in Sandycove at the Martello tower where Joyce briefly lived and where he set the opening scene in Ulysses, and the Dublin Writers Museum.Template:SfnUniversity College London holds the only major research collection of Joyce's work in the United Kingdom, including first editions of all of Joyce's major works, many other editions and translations, as well as critical and background literature.Template:Sfn The University at Buffalo's James Joyce Collection has more than 10,000 pages of the author's working papers, notebooks, manuscripts, photographs, correspondence and other materials as well as Joyce's private library.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Bibliography

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Novels

[edit]

Stephen Dedalus

[edit]

Finnegan

[edit]

Short stories

[edit]

Poetry

[edit]

Play

[edit]
  • Exiles (Grant Richards Ltd., 1918)

Posthumous non-fiction

[edit]
  • The Critical Writings of James Joyce (Eds. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, 1959)
  • Letters of James Joyce Vol. 1 (Ed. Stuart Gilbert, 1957)
  • Letters of James Joyce Vol. 2 (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1966)
  • Letters of James Joyce Vol. 3 (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1966)
  • Selected Letters of James Joyce (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1975)
  • Collected Epiphanies of James Joyce: A Critical Edition (Eds. Angus McFadzean, Morris Beja, Sangam Macduff, 2024)

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Notes

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References

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Sources

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Books

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Journal articles

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Online sources

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Primary sources

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Literary works

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Electronic editions

Resources

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