Controversial, scandalous, erudite and funny, Ulysses is undisputedly a landmark of twentieth-century modernism. It charts one day – 16th June 1904 – in the lives of three inhabitants of Dublin: the advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, the artist Stephen Dedalus and Bloom’s wife Molly. Their peregrinations, thoughts and encounters form the basis of the narrative, which becomes a celebration of all human experience through the lives of specific individuals in a specific place at a specific time. Ulysses is both an experimental novel and a book intimately concerned with the events of modern life.
A lively repository of literary allusion and colloquial realism, this dazzlingly innovative, ambitious novel is here presented in its 1939 Odyssey Press version, which is regarded as the most accurate text published in Joyce’s lifetime. This edition also includes over 9,000 notes by Joyce scholars Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner.
