The main features of James Joyce’s work

2.3 Literary riview: Published in 1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man represented a coming of age story more autobiographical of James Joyce's life. Stephen Dedalus is the protagonist of the story. Through Stephen's storytelling, Joyce gave a glimpse into his childhood and adolescence, focusing on how he became self-aware. Within this work, he employed the unique writing technique of stream of consciousness through many inner monologues of Stephen. Joyce often depicted the reality within Stephen's head instead of the scenes around him. Psychological realism is portrayed throughout the novel to show how one's mind works and give a better understanding of the thoughts and feelings of Joyce himself.
James Joyce wrote most of his short stories in his early years of writing. Most of his stories are found within the collection of Dubliners. The James Joyce stories were:

James Joyce remains one of the most significant and influential writers of the 20th-century. Many modern fiction writers refer to Ulysses as a model for language, literary structure, and form. Joyce's raw portrayal of human nature and unique linguistic style made him one of the more substantial artists influencing the modernist movement and contemporary culture. The James Joyce Tower and Museum is located off Sandycove in Dublin. Joyce briefly stayed at the tower in 1904, and he later used the tower as part of the opening scene in Ulysses. The tower was turned into a museum in 1962 and dedicated to the works of Joyce. He has also been immortalized in brass as a statue located on the city streets of Dublin. James Joyce's unique writing style was incredibly influential. Most of his books and stories centered around Irish culture and life, but Joyce's writing style varied throughout each work. He was known for creating the writing technique of stream of consciousness, diving into the mind and trying to capture how it sounded. Joyce relied on Realism to form his short stories in Dubliners. At the same time, he used experimental language and style to create Ulysses. He strayed from Realism to become more Modernist with his form. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is considered more of an autobiography than a story as Joyce recounted his experiences in childhood and adolescence. His last novel, Finnegan's Wake, is considered his most unique in style and form. The first and last lines are the same making the novel circular. Though Joyce's works continue to be criticized, he is considered one of the most significant Modernist writers of the 20th-century. Introduction to James Joyce
Ulysses by Joyce is considered one of the best books in the English language
James Joyce is an Irish author, and he's really one of the more important literary figures of the 20th century. He's so important, actually, that people in Dublin and all over the world celebrate Bloomsday - named after one of the main characters in his book Ulysses - every year on June 16. They raise a stein to James Joyce in a metaphorical and probably literal sense. He's really a figure that's had long-lasting impact in literature, and he's pretty well-remembered. Ulysses is considered one of the best books in the English language by a lot of people; it's a key book for the Modernist movement, which is a movement in literature between World War I and World War II.

Joyce's works, as they go along in sequence, get more and more confusing and difficult. This is also a hallmark of Modernism. He's particularly famous for starting or honing the technique known as stream of consciousness. You might take a look at a passage written in stream of consciousness and think 'what's so great about this?' I'm going to read you a passage just so you can get a little idea.
'Yes because he never did a thing like that before as asked to get breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms Hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his….'
You get the idea. There's not a lot of punctuation; there's not really a lot going on to signify what that all means. The thing that distinguishes his stream of consciousness from something that I might come up with writing is that there's a lot of intention behind it. We'll go into more specifics later on of why we know this, why we're pretty sure that this is intentional, that the way he frames things isn't an accident, that even if it seems like a stream of mess it really has got intention and meaning behind it.Who is James Joyce?
But first let's talk about who Joyce is as an author. He's born in 1882, which, coincidentally, is the same year that Virginia Woolf was born, and he's the oldest of 10 surviving children; that's a lot of kids. He's the oldest, so he probably gets all the benefits of that. His family was pretty well-off to begin with; they were doing okay, but as he rose up they kind of descend further and further into poverty, and that becomes a problem. He starts out going to boarding school - actually the same boarding school that his character Stephen Dedalus attends in his novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (it's a little autobiographical) - but he can't keep going there because they can't pay anymore, so he comes back and has to go to local school. He goes to college in Dublin and heads off to Paris - he wants to go to medical school - but that doesn't work out so well; he doesn't really like it and he can't really follow the lectures in French (I'm sure you and I can identify with that). He has to come home because his mom is sick and dying. He ends up staying in Dublin and starts to work on what's eventually going to become Portrait. It starts off as an essay and morphs into a novel he's going to call Stephen Hero - Stephen is the hero of the book, that's pretty self-explanatory - and he eventually over the course of many years rewrites it into what we know as Portrait.
In the meantime, in 1904, on June 16 - that date might sound familiar - he meets his future wife Nora Barnacle, which might be the best name ever. That day lives on in infamy because it's the day he chooses to set Ulysses (his second big novel) on. They hit it off, they end up eloping in Zurich, they end up in Trieste in Italy, they have a couple kids, and then in 1914 he publishes a short-story collection called Dubliners. In the meantime he's also been working on a revised version of Portrait that's not Stephen Hero; he publishes that in book form in 1916.
Now he starts working on Ulysses, which starts getting published serially - in installments in a magazine - in 1918. That gets shut down after about chapter 13, because that's when the main character Leopold Bloom masturbates on the beach and there's a big description of it. They can't publish that serially anymore; it turns into a big court case about censorship that actually has a lot of implications further down the road for what's considered pornography. It was not, so it opened the door for lots of things. Publishing had to be stopped serially but Ulysses gets published in its final book form in 1922.
Then Joyce starts working on Finnegans Wake, which is going to be his last book. It takes him awhile; it's not published finally until 1939, although again it's sort of in a serial format published throughout that time. Then he dies in 1941 from surgery for an ulcer. He'd not been in great health, couldn't handle the surgery and he died. He was still not in the best place with his religious beliefs, so his wife didn't want to have mass for him - and that's his life. He starts off as this boy in Dublin and kind of follows the trajectory he lays out in Portrait for his character; he ends up becoming this great writer.
Joyce is a particularly interesting author not just because of his stature in 20th century literature but because he really changes a lot from book-to-book in his style. Just as a way to go over his four main works we're going to take a look at each one, when it was published and a sample line. I was trying to think of something that comes up in every one of his works, and prostitutes come up in every one of them, so we're just going to go through and read a description of a prostitute from every work. It's going to show you how he gets weirder and weirder and weirder as we go along.James Joyce, an Irish novelist, was one of the most impressive and the most potent figures of the 20th century. He was born in Dublin, Ireland and is deemed the quintessential Irish writer. He spent a part of his life out of Dublin wandering and roaming in European continents. During that while, he focused on creating the portrait of Ulysses; a note on Irish life as experienced by a Dubliner. This novel met a heavy controversy when published in 1922. Its publication was banned in many locations yet it was the most widely read book of the previous century. Joyce belonged to a middle-class Catholic family. He received early education from Jesuits school. His training as a schoolboy under Jesuits gives an account of material for the initial chapters of his autobiography The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. During school days he received scholarships one after one and helped restore the deteriorating financial situation of his family. In the meantime, he openly opposed the social and religious orders of his time. He eventually left Catholicism and embraced aesthetic philosophy. Joyce studied modern languages and proved to be a brilliant polyglot linguist. Ibsen’s work greatly influenced Joyce’s writing. He admired his unmatched intellect and choice of exile from his own land. Just like Ibsen, his writing was also attacked as ‘subversive’. When he was in Paris, he met exile by Irish nationalists and literary circles. He met with Nora Barnacle and developed his relationship with her as a lifelong companion.
After voluntary exile from Ireland, he settled in Croatia and then resided in Trieste. For Joyce, who effectively left Ireland for good in 1904, returning only for three brief visits, the supreme artist lives on in local time abroad, and “beats” time only the way a musician might at the podium.In 1914, his work Dubliners was published which couldn’t receive commercial success but attracted intellects and critics including Ezra Pound. Lately, he became his friend and helped him in publicizing works. He also supported him financially. He completed his famous novel Ulysses in Zurich which took seven years to complete. He moved to Paris and after the outbreak of war, returned to Zurich