The Twenties of the Twentieth century. English Literature in the 1930s and 1940s William Butler Yeats

James Joyce
(1882-1941)
James Joyce is regarded as the most original and influential writer of the twentieth century. Irishman by birth, he exercised a considerable influence upon modern English and American literature.
He was born in Dublin, the eldest of a family of ten children. His father was a civil servant, continually in financial difficulties. For several years Joyce attended Clongowes Wood College, before his family’s increasing poverty made this impossible. He later attended University College, Dublin, where he was a brilliant scholar, accomplished in Latin, French, Italian and Norwegian.
While he was still an undergraduate he began writing lyrical poems, which were collected in “Chamber Music” (1907). Upon graduation from the University in 1902, Joyce lived for a time in Paris where he contributed book reviews to Dublin newspapers. After a brief return to Dublin for his mother’s burial, he moved to the continent with Nora Barnacle to spend the rest of his life in Paris, Trieste, Rome and Zurich.
In 1909 and 1912, Joyce made his last two trips to Ireland to arrange the publication of a collection of fifteen stories “Dubliners”, the dominant mood of which is realistic. This work was published only in 1914. Joyce said that his purpose in writing the short stories collected in “Dubliners” was to produce “a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because the city seemed to me the center of paralysis”. He wanted to give “the Irish people ... one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass”. The style of “Dubliners” marks a sharp break with the fiction of the nineteenth century. Joyce located the center of the action in the minds of his characters. Incident and plot are subordinated to psychological revelation. Each word and detail has a calculated purpose, and the meaning of the story is presented as an epiphany - a moment of heightened awareness that can occur as a result of a trivial encounter, object, or event. For example, in “Araby”, one of “Dubliners” short stories, epiphany occurs in the final paragraph and runs as following “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”
In 1916 his partly autobiographical novel “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and in 1922 his most famous novel “Ulysses” were published.
“Ulysses” is a dazzling original attempt to tell the story of group of Dubliners on a single day and at the same time present a symbolic view of human history. Seven hundred pages of the novel relate of one day in the life of two Dubliners who are not acquainted. Leopold Bloom, an advertising agent, and Stephen Dedalus, a poet and teacher, ramble in the streets of Dublin; the paths of these two men cross and re-cross through the day and finally they meet only for a leave-taking. The book is built on parallel from Homer’s Odyssey, i.e. each chapter revives an incident from Homer’s epic and each character has a Homeric prototype.
In “Ulysses”, rendering the workings of his character’s minds, Joyce introduced the so-called stream-of-consciousness technique recording the flow of their thoughts and sensations with all the complex associations attached to them. The remaining seventeen years of his life Joyce worked on his next novel “Finnegans Wake” (1939). This book carried the stylistic experimentation of “Ulysses” further.

1¹ . Those that I guard I do not love: In the World War I Ireland was technically
neutral and was going on struggle for independence from England. But many
Irish volunteered to fight on the English side.

2² . Kiltarten: a village near the estate of the Gregory family.