The First Century of Ulysses

The publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses on 2nd February 1922 was a seminal event in literature and modernism. Determined to write the defining novel of the new century, Joyce spent seven years writing a masterwork of realism and symbolism, written in a way that no one has ever managed to replicate. Joyce famously declared that if Dublin was ever destroyed it could be reconstructed from the pages of his great novel Ulysses. The Dictionary of Irish Biography tells us that Joyce gave “infinitely subtle attention to the subjectivity of an insignificant Dubliner called Bloom” and by doing so “created one of the greatest figures of twentieth-century fiction, and the novel has been permanently altered by what he did.”