San Antonio College Library

The publication of James Joyce's Ulysses crowned years of writing and constant rewriting at almost every stage, so that as many as ten versions exist for some pages. To understand how Joyce worked, Michael Groden traces the book's history in detail, synthesizing evidence from notebooks, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs.

In proposing that places, movements, and directions are deeply implicated in the narrative structure of Ulysses, Michael Seidel contends that Joyce recreates in Dublin the significant epic geography of the Odyssey. The author demonstrates how Joyce adjusts the spaces of Ulysses to accommodate the three theaters of Homeric action as mapped by Victor Berard's Lex Pheniciens et I'Odyssee.

Set entirely on one day, 16 June 1904, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus as they go about their daily business in Dublin. From this starting point, James Joyce constructs a novel of extraordinary imaginative richness and depth. Unique in the history of literature, Ulysses is one of the most important works of the twentieth century.

Ulysses chronicles the appointments and encounters of the itinerant Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. Ulysses is the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey, and the novel establishes a series of parallels between the poem and the novel, with structural correspondences between the characters and experiences of Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus,...

Explores the lessons that modern readers can draw from Joyce's classic work, revealing how "Ulysses" presents a vision of a more tolerant and decent society in which the seemingly banal hero, Leopold Bloom, represents ordinary wisdom that can offer a model for living.