The Complete Novels of James Joyce

This collection comprises of Joyce's three novels, plus the short story collection Dubliners. Dubliners, about Joyce's native city, is faithful to his country, seeing it unflinchingly and challenging every precedent and piety in Irish literature. The stories in Dubliners show us truants, seducers, hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, struggling musicians, poets, patriots, and many more simply striving to get by. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man falls between the realism of Dubliners and the symbolism of Ulysses. The novel is a highly autobiographical account of the youth of Stephen Dedalus, who comes to realize that before he can become a true artist, he must rid himself of the stultifying effects of the religion, politics and essential bigotry of his life in late 19th century Ireland. Written with a light touch, it is perhaps the most accessible of Joyce's works. Ulysses is James Joyce's astonishing masterpiece. Scandalously frank, it tells of the events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, during which Bloom's voluptuous wife, Molly, commits adultery. Initially deemed obscene in England and the USA, this richly-allusive novel, revolutionary in its modernistic experimentalism, was hailed as a work of genius by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. Finnegans Wake is the book of Here Comes Everybody and Anna Livia Plurabelle and their family - their book, but in a curious way the book of us all as well as all our books. Joyce's last great work, it is not comprised of many borrowed styles, like Ulysses, but, rather, formulated as one dense, tongue-twisting soundscape. It also remains the most hilarious, 'obscene', book of innuendos ever to be imagined.

About the Author

James Joyce

James Joyce was born on February 2nd1882 in the suburb of Rathgar, Dublin; he died on January 13th,1941, in Zürich, and was buried there. These bare facts tell us a great deal about Joyce. He was born and grew up in the nineteenth century, in a period when Ireland was under the political and social control of England, and under the even firmer moral control of the Catholic Church. But he died in Europe, during the Second World War, in a country that could give him shelter precisely because it was neutral. That Ireland was also neutral in that war was by then of no consequence to him; his final visit to his native country was in 1912. He flew by those nets of nationhood. James Joyce was the first surviving child of John Joyce and Mary Jane Murray. When he was born in 1882, the family was reasonably well-to-do, John Joyce holding a position as collector of rates. James Joyce was educated first at the Jesuit boarding school, Clongowes Wood College, from1888 to 1891. When he was nine years old, his father was pensioned off from his position, and the Joyces became substantially poorer. Eventually, after a spell with the Christian Brothers, James went in 1893, along with his nearest brother Stanislaus, to the Jesuit school, Belvedere College in Dublin; their education was free. In 1898 he began his studies in modern languages at University College, Dublin. It was here that he began writing, essays, plays and poems. After graduating in 1902, he initially enrolled as a medical student, but shortly thereafter travelled to Paris, working from hand to mouth, writing and teaching. In 1903 he returned to Dublin to attend his mother on her death-bed; she died in August, 1903, at the age of forty-four. Early in 1904, Joyce began writing Stephen Hero which would eventually, over many years, become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. At the same time, he pursued briefly the possibility of a singing career. He had an excellent tenor voice, and was encouraged by John McCormack, then the upcoming Irish tenor. He took professional singing lessons and entered the Feis Ceoil, the competitive Festival of Music, for 1904, the competition which McCormack had won in 1903. Joyce did not complete the competition, perhaps because he could not sight read the final competitive piece. He was nonetheless awarded the bronze medal. Thereafter, he and McCormack kept in touch and later Joyce presented him with copies of his novels. Joyce met his great love, Nora Barnacle, in June1904 and myth has it that their first sexual encounter took place on June 16th,a date sanctified in Ulysses, and ever afterwards in Irish cultural history as Bloomsday. Soon afterwards, he wrote the first of the stories that would become Dubliners; The Sisters was published in the Irish Homestead in July, 1904. In September, 1904 Joyce began living in the Martello Tower in Sandycove that would later figure in Ulysses, but at the same time he was deepening his relationship with Nora. In October, 1904 they left Dublin together, unmarried, but permanently wedded; James Joyce was twenty-two years old, Nora Barnacle twenty. They settled in Trieste, where Joyce worked as an English teacher. Joyce s brother Stanislaus joined them. Their children Giorgio and Lucia were born there. It was during this period that Joyce completed Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, together with the play, Exiles and a large part of Ulysses. Joyce was always beset by publishing difficulties; his work challenged orthodoxy, and printers in particular objected to his work, being legally responsible as they were for any charge of indecency against it. In 1912, Joyce paid his last visit to Dublin. In 1914, Dubliners was, after many setbacks, published by Grant Richards, and in the same year the first chapters of Portrait were published in The Egoist under the editorship of Harriet Shaw.