James Joyce’s most celebrated novel, and one of the most highly regarded novels in the English language, records the events of one day—Thursday the 16th of June, 1904—in the city of Dublin.
The reader is first reintroduced to Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce’s previous novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . Stephen is now living in a rented Martello tower and working at a school, having completed his B.A. and a period of attempted further study in Paris. The focus then shifts to the book’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser and social outsider. It is a work day, so both Bloom and Stephen depart their homes for their respective journeys around Dublin.
While containing a richly detailed story and still being generally described as a novel, Ulysses breaks many of the bounds otherwise associated with the form. It consists of eighteen chapters, or “episodes,” each somehow echoing a scene in Homer’s Odyssey . Each episode takes place in a different setting, and each is written in a different, and often unusual, style. The book’s chief innovation is commonly cited to be its expansion of the “free indirect discourse” or “interior monologue” technique that Joyce used in his previous two books.
Ulysses is known not only for its formal novelty and linguistic inventiveness, but for its storied publication history. The first fourteen episodes of the book were serialized between 1918 and 1920 in The Little Review , while several episodes were published in 1919 in The Egoist . In 1921, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice won a trial regarding obscenity in the thirteenth episode, “Nausicaa.” The Little Review ’s editors were enjoined against publishing any further installments; Ulysses would not appear again in America until 1934.
