Ulysses (The ^AWorld's Classics) - Softcover

Joyce, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192828665 ISBN 13: 9780192828668

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2099

Synopsis

Ulysses has been the subject of controversy since copies of the first English edition were burned by the New York Post Office Authorities. Today critical interest centers on the authority of the text. This edition republishes, for the first time, without interference, the original 1922 text. Jeri Johnson's critical Introduction demystifies the complexities of the book, and a full textual publication history, helpful appendices, and explanatory notes guide the reader through this highly allusive text.

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Review:

Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.

Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus

From the Back Cover:

The first edition of Ulysses legally available in the United States was the Modern Library edition of 1934 issued after Random House defended the book against charges of obscenity. This volume reproduces the 1934 edition as corrected and reset in 1961. It includes a letter from James Joyce to Bennett Cerf, the publisher of the 1934 text; the decision by Judge John M. Woolsey lifting the ban on Ulysses; and a forward by Morris L. Ernst; who defended the book at the trial.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2099
• ISBN 10: 0192828665
• ISBN 13: 9780192828668
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1056
• Editor: Johnson Jeri