Compiled  BY LONDON SWAMINATHAN

Post No. 9286

Date uploaded in London – –20 FEBRUARY  2021     

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Irish novelist, poet and short story writer James Joyce took 14 years to complete his novel Ulysses and 17 years to finish his Finnegans Wake

His eye sight became so poor he had to write on the back of posters, and he had 13 eye operations .

He was the youngest of ten children in his family. His father managed to drink all the money away and the family had moved every few months to avoid paying the rent.

James Joyce did not like life in Ireland and so he left the country when he was 22 years old, and never came back. He died in Switzerland at the age of 58.

He went with his girlfriend Nora whom he married in 1933. He had two children.

After moving to Poland, he moved to Trieste in Italy. He was a good singer and people used to gather in front of his house to listen to him.

Later the family moved to Zurich to escape from First World War.

Sex in Ulysses

All his writings have his home City Dublin. The Dublin in Ulysses was the Dublin of Joyce’ s childhood and adolescence. Many of the characters in the book are people Joyce knew in Dublin, some of whom he despised, and he used Ulysses as a way of ridiculing them. This naturally did not please some citizens, and Joyce’s sisters were ashamed of their brother. They thought his book is morally corrupting the people.

Ulysses is an epic about Dublin, loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey. Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s main character encounters similar adventures to Homer’s Odysseus. But Leopold isn’t the usual type of hero. He is an ordinary man full of compassion and tolerance but also someone who has sexual fantasies, and this is what the censors of 1922 found hard to take.

Ulysses was banned in Britain and burned in the United States, but in Paris, Joyce was praised as a genius.

After he finished Ulysses, Joyce embarked on Finnegans Wake , which is a book about night and what goes on in the dream world. Joyce was a polyglot and thousands of words from 65 languages find their way onto this book. He twisted them into puns and endless wordplay, so that everything in Finnegans Wake has many layers of meaning.

Since his death Joyce has become an important figure in Irish cultural life. Now Irish consider him a great writer and a genius

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James Joyce

Born- February 2,1882

Died – January 13,1941

Age at death-58

James Joyce is perhaps the most important author of the 20th century. He invented a new kind of story telling and experimented with language to create a kind of writing unlike anything that had been seen before.

Joyce was born the youngest of ten children in the Irish city of Dublin. He was educated at strict catholic schools that were intended to prepare him for a life as a priest . As a young man Joyce rejected this idea- the spiritual struggle he went through to reach this decision became a central theme of his writing in later life.

While studying at universities in Dublin and Paris, Joyce began to write. His first book Chamber Music- published when he was 25- is a collection of poems, but it was not until he began writing novels that Joyce genius became clear. His first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a young Man is based his own early life. In it Joyce used the stream of coniousness technique to tell the story through the thought .

The thoughts and the feelings of the main character- a sensitive young man who rejects religion and decides to become a greater writer.

Joyce wrote his first masterpiece Ulysses, while living in Italy and Switzerland. It returns to the central Character of his first novel – now a struggling writer living in Dublin. The events in the book take place in just one day in Dublin, but Joyce describes the thoughts of his characters so completely that many people claimed that he had summed up the whole of human life in one book. Ulysses had a huge influence on many writers of the 20th century.

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Publications

1907 Chamber Music

1914 Dubliners

1916 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

1918 Exiles

1922 Ulysses

1027 Pomes Penyeah

1936 Collected Poems

1939 Finnegans Wake

–subham—

tags – James Joyce, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Dublin