Ulysses (Annotated)

Critical Edition with Literary Analysis & Author Biography | James Joyce | Erato Press

By: James Joyce

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Most readers have heard of Ulysses. Few have actually read it. This edition is for both.

Published in Paris in 1922, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom through a single day in Dublin — June 16, 1904 — and in doing so dismantles every assumption about what a novel can be and do. Stream of consciousness, interior monologue, parody, myth, obscenity, tenderness, comedy: Joyce deploys them all simultaneously, not as technique but as necessity. He was not being difficult. He was being honest about the way a mind actually works.

Ulysses — One day. One city. One man buying a kidney for breakfast, attending a funeral, wandering through pubs and newspapers and brothels and the interior of his own mind. His wife in bed at home, thinking of everything. The Odyssey, rewritten as if Homer had access to the unconscious.

The novel that critics called unreadable sold out its first edition immediately. The novel that was banned in the United States for obscenity is now taught in every serious literature program in the world. The contradiction is the point.

✦ Complete and unabridged — the full 1922 text, in the authoritative edition.

This edition also contains:

✦ The Total Book: A Literary Analysis of James Joyce's Ulysses — an original essay examining the structure, language, and ambition of the novel as a unified artistic project ✦ The World That Made Ulysses — historical context for the modernist revolution: Dublin in 1904, the Irish Question, the collapse of Victorian certainties, and the literary moment that made this book possible ✦ James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as Exile — a full critical biography: the poverty, the wandering, the vision, and the contradictions of the man who spent his life writing about a city he never returned to

For readers who enjoy:

✦ James Joyce (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) ✦ Irish literary fiction with historical and cultural depth ✦ Modernist classics with critical apparatus that actually illuminates ✦ Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and the tradition of fiction as philosophy

He left Dublin in 1904 and never came back. He spent the rest of his life writing about nothing else. There is a lesson in that about the nature of obsession, exile, and the only city that ever really exists — the one inside the skull.