Ulysses (eBook)

Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach in February 1922, in Paris. Joyce divided Ulysses into 18 chapters or "episodes". 

At first glance much of the book may appear unstructured and chaotic; Joyce once said that he had "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant," which would earn the novel "immortality". Every episode of Ulysses has a theme, technique, and correspondence between its characters and those of the Odyssey. 

The original text did not include these episode titles and the correspondences; instead, they originate from the Linati and Gilbert schemata. Joyce referred to the episodes by their Homeric titles in his letters. He took the idiosyncratic rendering of some of the titles––'Nausikaa', the 'Telemachia'––from Victor Berard's two-volume Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée which he consulted in 1918. Ulysses chronicles the peripatetic appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. 

The novel establishes a series of parallels between its characters and events and those of the poem. Ulysses' stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring, and experimental prose—full of puns, parodies, and allusions, as well as its rich charaterisations and broad humour, made the book a highly regarded novel in the Mordernist pantheon. In 1998, the American publishing firm Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English Language novels of the 20^th century.

EBC Reader Version: The above eBook is available only on the EBC Reader app, download the free application on iOS & Android phones/tablets or log onto EBC Reader Web version. Click above for more details.