Ulysses: Introduction by Craig Raine [Hardcover]

The most famous day in literature is June 16, 1904, when a certain Mr. Leopold Bloom of Dublin eats a kidney for breakfast, attends a funeral, admires a girl on the beach, contemplates his wife’s imminent adultery, and, late at night, befriends a drunken young poet in the city’s red-light district.

 

An earthy story, a virtuoso technical display, and a literary revolution all rolled into one, James Joyce’sUlyssesis a touchstone of our modernity and one of the towering achievements of the human mind.

“Joyce’s parallel use ofThe Odyssey…has the importance of a scientific discovery…It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history…It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art.” –T. S. Eliot

“Ulysseshas enough verbal splendor to furnish a legion of novels…You will have difficulty finding a fuller portrait of the natural man.” –Harold Bloom,The Western Canon

“One might almost risk praising [Ulysses] for being a work of literature in which the spirit of one man is eternally confirmed in all its complexity.” –from the Introduction

With an Introduction by Craig RaineJames Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. The oldest of ten children, he grew up in a family that went from prosperity to penury because of his father’s wastrel behavior. After receiving a rigorous Jesuit education, twenty-year-old Joyce renounced his Catholicism and left Dublin in 1902 to spend most of his life as a writer in exile in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich. On one trip back to Ireland, he fell in love with the now famous Nora Barnacle on June 16, the day he later chose as “Bloomsday” inlC6