Discover new books on Goodreads

See if your friends have read any of James Joyce's books

James Joyce’s Followers (9,923)

Add New
Videos

3 comments

James Joyce

Born

in Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland

February 02, 1882

Died

January 13, 1941

Website

http://www.jamesjoyce.ie/

Genre

Fiction, Poetry

Influences

edit data

James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his pioneering mastery and popularization of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Born into a middle-class Catholic family in the Rathgar suburb of Dublin in 1882, Joyce spent the majority of his adult life in self-imposed exile across continental Europe—living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris—yet his entire, meticulous body of work remained obsessively and comprehensively focused on the minutiae of his native city, making Dublin both the meticulously detailed setting and a central, inescapable character in his literary universe. His work is consist James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his pioneering mastery and popularization of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Born into a middle-class Catholic family in the Rathgar suburb of Dublin in 1882, Joyce spent the majority of his adult life in self-imposed exile across continental Europe—living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris—yet his entire, meticulous body of work remained obsessively and comprehensively focused on the minutiae of his native city, making Dublin both the meticulously detailed setting and a central, inescapable character in his literary universe. His work is consistently characterized by its technical complexity, rich literary allusion, intricate symbolism, and an unflinching examination of the spectrum of human consciousness. Joyce began his published career with Dubliners (1914), a collection of fifteen short stories offering a naturalistic, often stark, depiction of middle-class Irish life and the moral and spiritual paralysis he observed in its inhabitants, concluding each story with a moment of crucial, sudden self-understanding he termed an "epiphany." This collection was followed by the highly autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a Bildungsroman that meticulously chronicled the intellectual and artistic awakening of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, who would become Joyce's recurring alter ego and intellectual stand-in throughout his major works.
His magnum opus, Ulysses (1922), is universally regarded as a landmark work of fiction that fundamentally revolutionized the novel form. It compressed the events of a single, ordinary day—June 16, 1904, a date now globally celebrated by literary enthusiasts as "Bloomsday"—into a sprawling, epic narrative that structurally and symbolically paralleled Homer's Odyssey, using a dazzling array of distinct styles and linguistic invention across its eighteen episodes to explore the lives of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus in hyper-minute detail. The novel's explicit content and innovative, challenging structure led to its initial banning for obscenity in the United States and the United Kingdom, turning Joyce into a cause célèbre for artistic freedom and the boundaries of literary expression. His final, most challenging work, Finnegans Wake (1939), pushed the boundaries of language and conventional narrative even further, employing a dense, dream-like prose filled with multilingual puns, invented portmanteau words, and layered allusions that continues to divide and challenge readers and scholars to this day. A dedicated polyglot who reportedly learned several languages, including Norwegian simply to read Ibsen in the original, Joyce approached the English language not as a fixed entity with rigid rules, but as a malleable medium capable of infinite reinvention and expression. His personal life was marked by an unwavering dedication to his literary craft, a complex, devoted relationship with his wife Nora Barnacle, and chronic, debilitating eye problems that necessitated numerous painful surgeries throughout his life, sometimes forcing him to write with crayons on large white paper. Despite these severe physical ailments and financial struggles, his singular literary vision remained sharp, focused, and profoundly revolutionary. Joyce passed away in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1941, shortly after undergoing one of his many eye operations. Today, he is widely regarded as perhaps the most significant and challenging writer of the 20th century. His immense, complex legacy is robustly maintained by global academic study and institutions such as the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, which ensures his complex, demanding, and utterly brilliant work endures, inviting new generations of readers to explore the very essence of what it means to be hum ...more

Combine Editions
James Joyce’s books

Average rating: 3.75 · 582,086 ratings · 42,295 reviews · 1,878 distinct works • Similar authors

	Dubliners 3.83 avg rating — 185,381 ratings — published 1914 — 5449 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 3.65 avg rating — 168,186 ratings — published 1916 — 1331 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Ulysses 3.76 avg rating — 141,601 ratings — published 1922 — 15 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Dead 3.96 avg rating — 25,990 ratings — published 1914 — 262 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Finnegans Wake 3.68 avg rating — 13,894 ratings — published 1939	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Araby 3.62 avg rating — 8,129 ratings — published 1914 — 40 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man / Dubliners by James Joyce, Kevin J.H. Dettmar (Introduction) 3.93 avg rating — 7,075 ratings — published 1914 — 55 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Eveline 3.60 avg rating — 2,918 ratings — published 1904 — 26 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Exiles 3.51 avg rating — 2,404 ratings — published 1914	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Chamber Music 3.44 avg rating — 1,608 ratings — published 1905 — 200 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by James Joyce…

Series by James Joyce

يوليسيس (4 books)
by

James Joyce,

جيمس جويس,

صلاح نيازي (مترجم)

3.63 avg rating — 94 ratings

James Joyce: Letters (3 books)
by

James Joyce,

Richard Ellmann (Editor)

4.35 avg rating — 77 ratings

Finnegans Wake (6 books)
by

James Joyce,

Fabio Pedone (Foreword, Editor, Translator),

Enrico Terrinoni (Afterword, Editor, Translator),

Stefano Bartezzaghi (Foreword)

4.16 avg rating — 25 ratings

Is there any better feeling than cracking open a great book? How about starting a great book…about books? For the readers who love to read...

Polls

January 2015 New School Classic Poll

1985, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, 348 pages

16 votes, 28.6%

1952, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, 581 pages

7 votes, 12.5%

1933, Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 315 pages

7 votes, 12.5%

1958, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, 209 pages

6 votes, 10.7%

1951, The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, 160 pages

5 votes, 8.9%

1985, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, 400 pages

4 votes, 7.1%

1958, The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 320 pages

3 votes, 5.4%

1973, Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, 302 pages

3 votes, 5.4%

1985, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy, 337 pages

2 votes, 3.6%

1920, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, 305 pages

2 votes, 3.6%

1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, 329 pages

1 vote, 1.8%

1928, Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, 300 pages

0 votes, 0.0%

1947, A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, 107 pages

0 votes, 0.0%

1958, The Bell by Iris Murdoch, 320 pages

0 votes, 0.0%

56 total votes

comments and details

More...

Topics Mentioning This Author

topics	posts	views	last activity
SciFi and Fantasy...: The Road -- How do you feel about the lack of punctuation	24	260	Mar 01, 2009 11:59AM
Glens Falls (NY) ...: Ulysses by James Joyce	12	94	Mar 12, 2009 09:17AM
The Book Challenge: Michelle Kay's Reads 2009	4	1213	Apr 17, 2009 12:42AM
The Seasonal Read...: FALL CHALLENGE 2009 PLANS	167	1536	Oct 14, 2009 08:10AM
Challenge: 50 Books: Collections of Short Stories	15	612	Nov 25, 2009 11:35AM
Challenge: 50 Books: Anyone started thinking about list for 2010?	109	361	Dec 30, 2009 12:04PM
The Next Best Boo...: Hollis: 400 book challenge	104	462	Dec 31, 2009 06:30AM
The History Book ...: ARCHIVE - BOOKS AND OTHER WORKS CITED BY BARZUN	64	217	Mar 07, 2010 08:45PM

More…

James Joyce’s Followers (9,923)

Add NewVideos

James Joyce

Combine EditionsJames Joyce’s books

Series by James Joyce

Related News

Polls

Topics Mentioning This Author

Add New
Videos

Combine Editions
James Joyce’s books