The Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1942) lived in the time of the Irish Literary Revival (1890-22), a movement led by the Nobel prize-winning poet W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). His identity as an Irish Catholic and a graduate of the newly-formed National University set him apart from the predominantly Protestant leadership of the Revival, on the one hand, and the mass of Irish Catholic nationalists on the other. Joyce’s intellectual brilliance and irrespressible self-esteem caused him to go into ‘self-exile’, taking with him his unmarried and largely uneducated partner Nora Barnacle, the inspiration for Molly Bloom and much else in his writing. (In fact, the date of his first tryst with Nora, 16 June 1904, became the day of his great novel Ulysses.)
 Joyce settled in Trieste and there he worked as an English-language teacher and wrote Ulysses. In 1919 he moved with his family to Paris to enjoy his newly won fame as the foremost Modernist writer in English secured through the serialisation of the novel (to be published in 1922). His first book was the stories of Dubliners (1914), an epoch-making treatment of the life of a regional city, as Dublin was in 1904 when he left it. Publication was delayed for a decade due to the publishers’ and printers’ fears of censorship. With his next, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) he changed the way in which autobiographical fiction is written and issued a clarion-call for intellectual freedom against the authoritarian culture of “priest and king” - and the central character, Stephen Dedalus, later puts it in Ulysses (1922).
  With the composition of a story called “The Dead” in 1907, Joyce ceased to be Stephen Hero - the title of his draft Portrait. “The Dead”, which forms the last part of Dubliners, displays a more mature and all-embracing conception of humanity that the earlier, mordantly satirical stories in which the theme of ‘spiritual paralysis’ lies at the centre of each. Meanwhile, in an abandoned story of 1906 to be called “Ulysses”, he had already sketched an encounter between young Stephen and an older man who works as an advertising agent for The Freeman’s Journal. That new character who came to be called Leopold Bloom was actually based on a man called Alfred Hunter who had rescued Joyce in a fight with several “tommies” [British soldiers] when the younger man was passing the evening drunkenly in the brothel quarter of the city - a real episode excerpted from his last year in Dublin.
  Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses is a dejected version of his forerunner in A Portrait. He has gone to Paris and returned for his mother’s death - without, it seems, becoming the literary hero that he had hoped. Leopold Bloom, by contrast, is an ordinary city-dweller with none of Stephen’s education. On the other hand he possesses a keen mind packed with much random information and therefore a fitting type for the new Everyman. Yet, in order to enter literature, as he does in Ulysses, he needed to be recognised by an artist as a proper hero for a modern Irish epic. It is essential to the autobiographical scheme of the novel that Stephen does not recognise Bloom as a fit subject for art whereas the mature Joyce (who is actually nearer Bloom's age than Stephen’s) does. It is from this discrepancy in age, outlook and experience that the comic humanism of Ulysses arises.
  Ulysses is divided into eighteen untitled chapters to which the now-familiar tags, taken from Homer’s Odyssey, have been added by the critics on the basis of chart or ‘schema’ which Joyce supplied to the author of the first book-length study of Ulysses (Stuart Gilbert) and to the Italian translator of the novel (Paulo Linati). In it, he delineated the main points of the Homeric parallel and some other ‘arts’, ‘organs’ and ‘correspondences’ which adorn each the symbolic design of each chapter, taking the Adventures of Ulysses by Charles Lamb - a classic redaction of Homer written in 1808 and still read in Joyce’s schooldays - as his keenly-felt inspiration. This ordering device or template became the of much critical attention from the start - especially after T. S. Eliot’s essay, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ appeared in an issue of The Dial (Oct. 1922).
  Eliot’s idea that Joyce uses myth to give order to ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ is not necessarily a true description of the spirit of the novel since Joyce was less daunted by modernity but the combination of such an apparatus with the liberal use of the stream-of-consciousness style of writing which was the chief technical innovation of Joyce’s novel found numerous imitators among writers such as Eliot himself, Virginia Wolff, George Faulkner, Thomas Woulfe and - in the most important Irish instance - Flann O’Brien.  Today the standing of Ulysses as the pre-eminent modern novel is undisputed.
  What is so remarkable about Ulysses? In it Joyce follows two characters’ travels through a single day in Dublin fully recording their thoughts from the inside by means the ‘interior monologue’ - these characters being Stephen and Dedalus along with Molly [Marion] Bloom in the magnificent chapter of eight unpunctuated sentences with which the novel ends. Molly is in bed when Bloom comes home. Pretending to be asleep, she reflects on her recent and less recent experience of woman’s life and men. Bloom, in his side, kisses her bottom in a sign of homage and acceptance and - the reader hopes - a renewal of their married life. (About that male gesture of affection she has mixed feelings too.)
  By means of the ‘itinerary’ form of the novel, Joyce captured an astonishing wealth of ascertainably-true details about the persons, places, businesses, institutions, entertainments and movements which characterised it on that day when, as we now know, Ireland was nigh-20 years away from Independence. In fact Joyce left Ireland before the revolutionary period properly began. The political humour of the novel is consistently anti-imperialist but it is not safe to assume that Joyce was pro-Independence in the form in which the modern Irish state actually emerged. On the contrary, he prove to be one of its sternest critics, recognising it as a reactionary country more than ever dominanted by clerical authority. The Roman not the Sassanach, he had earlier written, is the true tyrant of the country - meaning the Catholic Church more than the British Empire.
  Joyce derived many of the details of Ulysses from an annual city almanac called Hely-Thom’s Dublin Directory (1904) which he kept beside him as he wrote. Contemporary newspapers and information supplied by friends in response to epistolary request from him were also much in use. This very material aspect of the novel gives it a local rootedness unlike anything else in Western literature before. Joyce said that, if Dublin were destroyed it could be rebuilt brick by brick from his novel. Equally, in advancing from chapter to chapter - particularly after the serialised chapters became a literary beacon for many avant garde readers and writers - he greatly accelerated his experiments with style and form producing such tours-de-force as the synchronised and interspliced vignettes of “Wandering Rocks” (Ch. 10), the parody-history of English style in “Oxen of the Sun” (Ch. 14), the “Circe” episode (Ch. 15) where Joyce takes Stephen and Bloom to a brothel in the so-called Nighttown quarter of the city, and the Q&A catechism of “Ithaca”.